Japan's leading blockchain Astar (ASTR): what makes it so good?

What is Astar?

Astar Network is a scalable decentralized platform hub (center) for Polkadot smart contracts and its parachain. The platform was created by Japanese developers and is designed to run decentralized or Web3 applications.

Astar provides developers with many tools that facilitate the creation of smart contracts, private blockchain development, digital asset exchanges (swaps), liquidity mining, and many other tasks. The Astar Network aims to allow developers to focus on building Web3 applications without managing the infrastructure.

The testnet was launched in 2020 under the name Plasm Network. In 2021, the project team renamed the platform to Astar Network. The main network (mainnet) Astar Network was not launched until January 2022. Astar is the leading smart contract platform in Japan at the moment.

At various stages, the Astar project has raised $34 million from large and well-known funds and $12.8 million during the public sale of tokens. Astar investors were such notable companies in the crypto industry as:

• Binance Labs,
• Coinbase Ventures,
• Polychain Capital,
• HashKey Capital,
• Alchemy,
• DFG Capital,
• GSR and others.

How does Astar Network work?

The Astar blockchain acts as a multichain hub in the Polkadot ecosystem on which developers can build decentralized applications for DeFi, DAO, and NFT.

Astar Network is built on Parity Substrate, a Polkadot platform designed to release interoperable blockchains (parachains). In addition to Substrate, Astar Network supports other tools such as Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), WebAssembly (WASM), and cross-protocols to create network-compatible decentralized solutions.

With a variety of tools for developing dApps, Astar has many use cases that go far beyond conventional smart contracts:

• decentralized finance (DeFi),
• games (GameFi),
• NFT,
• cross-chain data exchange,
• web3 incubators, and more.

The platform provides developers with several unique features:

• Operator Trading is a mechanism for buying and selling dApps. Developers can create their solutions based on the Parity Substrate and purchase ready-made solutions. The mechanism opens up opportunities for monetizing smart contracts, transferring ownership to other users, and appointing third-party users as operators of dApps.
• Multi-Lockdrop is an advanced backdrop (locking tokens to obtain airdrop) mechanism that allows reward tokens to be distributed between networks. This will enable airdrops to be taken outside of just one blockchain.
• DApp Staking & Rewards is a reward system for decentralized application developers designed to add value to the Astar Network ecosystem. With the mining of each blockchain, Astar distributes 50% of the rewards to DApps developers. This approach incentivizes ecosystem participants to stake native ASTR tokens through smart contracts, which should positively impact their price.

Astar token

ASTR is a native token of the Astar Network blockchain platform used to pay network fees, manage DAOs, and act as validator rewards for staking.

Currently, only 8.3 billion ASTR tokens have been issued. Of these, 5.5 billion are currently circulating on the market. ASTR token has a no-issuance limit — the maximum number of tokens. ASTR is an inflationary token, which will only increase over time. Astar's protocol includes an inflation rate of 7% per annum.

ASTR token is ranked 65th in the CoinMarketCap ranking, with a capitalization exceeding $966.2 million. This figure has grown by 475% in just one year. Until October 2023, the capitalization fluctuated in a narrow range. It changed only slightly, but it began to grow rapidly against the general bullish trend in the crypto market.

Over the past year, ASTR's exchange rate has increased by 304% from $0.05 to $0.17 at the time of writing. The token's price fell to a local low of $0.039 in October. After that, ASTR price began to grow rapidly and, in January 2024, reached a local maximum, which is still below the absolute maximum (ATH), reached in April 2022 at $0.33, by almost 48%. The ATSR token is available on Binance, OKX, KuCoin, HTX, Gate.io and several other exchanges.

Is Astar a promising project?

The Astar Network project won Polkadot's third parachain auction and other successful platforms such as Acala and Moonbeam. In total, the Astar platform raised 10,333,552 DOT worth about $327.9 million, and the number of contributors to the auction reached 27,000.

It is also worth noting that the project was supported by significant crypto industry players such as:

• Binance Labs,
• OKEx (now OKX),
• Digital Finance Group,
• PAKA Ventures.

Digital Finance Group alone has contributed 300,000 DOT tokens to the Astar project worth $12.8 million at the exchange rate at the time of contribution.

The Astar ecosystem still includes only about 50 dApps. Still, given the technology, the project has potential, and it's not for nothing that it made it into the top 70 cryptocurrencies in capitalization.