From Bitcoin to Astar: Track Japan’s Love Affair with Blockchain

Japan loves blockchain. From the father of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, to modern smart contract networks, Japan’s changing tech tastes say a lot about the country’s culture – and the evolution of the crypto industry at large. Unpacking Japan’s evolving appetite for blockchain in all its forms requires a brief history lesson that spans the sector’s origins to the present day.

Astar becomes Japan’s Blockchain du Jour

Late last year, the Japan Blockchain Association, the largest organization of its kind in the Pacific island nation, conducted a simple poll. What, it wanted to know, was the nation’s blockchain of choice for building dApps? The answer, seen by Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche by a wide margin, was the Astar Network, the Polkadot-connected ecosystem for EVM and WASM smart contracts.

On the surface, the results of the informal survey may seem surprising, but a deeper investigation reveals the reasoning behind the public’s decision. Understanding how Japan gravitated towards Astar requires first recounting how it all started in the mists of 2008.

In the beginning it was Bitcoin

Given the Japanese pseudonym adopted by Bitcoin’s creator, the country has been there from day one, in spirit if not in locale. The odds are that Satoshi Nakamoto hails from further west, but regardless, by the time his seminal whitepaper was published in late 2008, he had caught the attention of keen eyes in the East.

In 2011, Bitcoin made waves across the Pacific. One of those who chose to surf that emblem was a Frenchman and Japanophile named Mark Karpeles. It was he who fatefully took over Mt. Gox, the first major bitcoin exchange, from Jed McCaleb, around the same time the latter began developing a cryptocurrency called Ripple.

While Mt. Gox’s fate remains a grisly story that still reverberates to this day, the Tokyo-based exchange was a runaway success at the time, responsible for putting Bitcoin – and by proxy Japan – on the map. By 2014, the exchange handled 70% of all BTC trading volume.

From making waves to changing ripples

When Mt. Gox was discontinued, the multi-crypto era had begun. BTC was still the daddy, but it now faced competition from newer cryptos that promised to be faster and more feature-rich than Satoshi’s creation. One of these was Jed McCaleb’s Ripple (XRP), which became a firm favorite across Asia, especially Japan. To this day, the Japanese routinely trade more XRP than any other crypto – bitcoin included.

By 2014, crypto had created its first memecoin in the form of dogecoin, and it also found favor in Japan. (At Devcon 5 in Osaka in 2019, ethereans rushed the stage to catch a glimpse of the original Shiba Inu dog that inspired the doge meme.) More than dogs, however, Japan loves cats and, predictably, the memecoin that fell the hardest in 2014 was monacoin, the first cat coin.

The Age of Ethereum

By 2015, crypto had once again moved on, this time to smart contract networks that offered more than just novelty. It was then that Ethereum was launched, with progenitors continuing to launch a number of blockchain projects popular in Japan to this day.

The original team of Ethereum founders included Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot, and Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano (other co-founders included Joe Lubin, founder of ConsenSys, and Anthony Di Iorio, Mihai Alisie, Jeffrey Wilcke, and Amir Chetrit, who seen dropped from the crypto scene).

Hoskinson was always a bit of a black sheep in this community and was allegedly kicked out early on due to ideological differences. Gavin Wood, on the other hand, has a very strong claim as one of the “founders” of Ethereum. His contributions are strongly technical – for example, he was responsible for creating Yellow Paper and designing Solidity, the programming language that underlies most smart contracts today.

Although Vitalik and Gav, as they are affectionately known, never quite aired their differences in public, it is quite clear that something happened between the two. Wood left the Ethereum core team in early 2016, publishing a farewell post without mentioning his work with Vitalik.

Cardano kickstarts the After-Eth era

In 2021, when Cardano’s network finally went live, Chinese and Japanese investors caught the hype and started buying ADA in droves. Everyone was looking for the next Ethereum, with Neo also positioned as the East’s answer to Vitalik’s creation. In Japan, however, it was Cardano that had caught fire, aided by a domestic IPO, no small feat in a country with such heavily regulated post-Gox exchanges.

Any project that can get its token listed on one of Japan’s exchanges has a good chance of finding a place in the nation’s hearts. Which brings us back to the Astar Network. With its EVM and WASM compatibility, Astar effectively connects the original Ethereum with one of the many successors touted as its “killer” – Polkadot.

Nor has it hurt Astar’s domestic prospects that the project is led by Sota Watanabe, one of Japan’s best-known crypto-entrepreneurs. Astar’s founder has worked closely with government officials to promote web3 adoption and has co-authored a whitepaper on the subject that has been published by the government. These factors have created the perfect storm for Astar to embed itself in Japan’s crypto culture and become the country’s unofficial Layer-1 leader.

Blockchain’s rails don’t stop moving, but even as technology evolves, Japan remains synonymous with crypto. It is nothing less than you would expect from the world’s third largest economy.

Image by David Peterson from Pixabay