Astar Network

Astar Network is Japan's most popular smart contract platform, supporting both EVM and WebAssembly (Wasm) environments, and interoperability between them using a Cross-Virtual Machine. Astar Network is friendly to all kinds of developers, and the tools and languages they already know. Backed by the shared security of Polkadot, Astar shines brilliantly on its own within a vibrant and healthy ecosystem, and in the blockchain industry overall driving international corporate adoption, and consumer interest in Web3 technologies.

Astar's Build2Earn system is designed to grow the network in an innovative way, while simultaneously rewarding participants and builders. It allows developers to earn incentives for building and maintaining their decentralized applications, and users to earn incentives for supporting their favorite projects, all while encouraging growth of the ecosystem overall.

Blockchains do not scale by design, mostly due to the security assurances inherent in their decentralized consensus mechanisms. If blockchains were faster, they would be less secure. Throughput, in transactions per second (TPS), is greatly reduced on blockchains compared to traditional, centralized databases, because there is an upper limit to the amount of data that can be stored in individual blocks. What this means in a practical sense, is that at times of network saturation, users on typical blockchains may notice their transactions sit unconfirmed or in a pending state for long periods of time, resulting in a poor experience.

The solution to the issue, up until now, has been a patchwork of independent blockchain silos loosely connected by insecure bridges, often subject to attack due to their custodial elements, with no common security standards or methods of interoperability. The idea of 'cross-chain', therefore, has mostly been to copy and paste a smart contract from one blockchain, to another, resulting in short term saturation of ecosystems with liquidity, while they thrive, only for it to flow like water to copycat projects in other ecosystems and dry up sometime later when incentives or number of unwitting victims reach a point of diminishing returns. Projects that create real value are quickly copied and deployed elsewhere for better, or for worse, with almost no real innovation taking place overall.

Astar Network is changing that, and ushering in the next generation of multichain smart contracts uniquely able to utilize the best features from both EVM and WebAssembly Virtual Machines, and any number of application-specific blockchains across the broader Polkadot ecosystem. All while being future-proof.

This interoperability framework, empowered by the shared security of Polkadot coupled with Astar XVM, allows developers to use and build smart contracts in ways they never have before. By fostering cooperation and integrations across multiple blockchains and applications, complex synergies can be developed, leading to the realization of truly innovative solutions that can't be replicated in any other environment.

Many different blockchains exist, but few have interoperability as their defining feature. Welcome to Astar Network.