The Web3 x AI Market Map Series: Soneium

Web3 x AI Ecosystem Series: Soneium Ecosystem Market Map -– Abdul Al Ali, Venture Investor at Decasonic 

We are excited to continue our Web3 x AI Market Map series with the release of the Soneium AI Market Map, mapping out the landscape of the joint venture ecosystem between Sony Group and Startale Labs. This is not our first time talking about the Soneium ecosystem, as we previously published a Soneium market map in October 2024. Since writing our previous article, Soneium launched on mainnet in January 2025, and has continued to attract builders and founders, with 200+ projects live on Soneium. 

To introduce Soneium: Soneium is an L2 built on Ethereum (utilizing the OP stack). In 2023, Sony’s blockchain ambitions were forwarded primarily through a partnership with Startale Labs, a Japanese-based team/blockchain solutions developer that previously founded another chain: The Astar Network. 

The founder of Startale Labs and Director at Sony Blockchain Solutions Labs, Sota Watanabe mentioned that Soneium aims to “realize an open internet that transcends boundaries.” Soneium focuses on making blockchain applications and technology accessible; with enhanced distribution channels that could leverage Sony Group’s divisions, including: Gaming, entertainment, finance, and music. 

The journey of the Soneium ecosystem begins with their Soneium Minato testnet, which recorded more than 47 million transactions across 14 million+ engaged active wallets. Following their testnet was the mainnet launch, which launched with the core mission of onboarding billions on-chain. As of the Q1 report by Soneium; the chain recorded 89.4M transactions made across 5.1M total addresses. 

The Soneium Ecosystem

Soneium Spark Program

Since inception, Soneium has been incredibly focused on supporting its ecosystem of developers through a combination of incubation programs, workshops, and investments. Their earliest program, the Spark program, announced in October 2024 of last year focused on supporting 32 projects building on Soneium. From the 32 projects admitted into the program, a collective of 1,785 applications were received, indicating heightened developer interest in Soneium. While not exclusively AI focused, the Spark program features AI builders and developers. A key project that emerged from Spark, which is AI-focused is Kyo Finance, a native-DeFAI project on Soneium that went on to eventually win Soneium’s Agentic Hackathon. 

Soneium Builders Workshop

In addition to their incubation programs, Soneium regularly hosts builders workshops for AI builders. Most recently, this included the Chainlink Functions Builders Workshop, where the Soneium team provided a work session for builders on building Soneium AI through Chainlink’s infrastructure and SDKs. 

These workshops extended more recently with the Agent Hackathon Workshop, where Soneium had six workshops for AI developers with Thirdweb, Alchemy, CrossMint, and ElizaOS as key supporters and participants. Those workshops demonstrate Soneium’s commitment to partnering with and supporting AI builders on their chain, giving them an avenue to grow both in mentorship and through grants and support programs. 

Soneium’s Agent Hackathon

On April 7, 2025 Soneium launched its Agent Hackathon. The hackathon focused on encouraging developers to build Soneium AI projects, with an emphasis on agents. The tracks dedicated for the event were AI & AI Agentic Systems, Creator Tools, and DeFi. Soneium supported the initiative through $30K in grants for participants. The result of the hackathon was quite clear, with over 400 active builders, with 2,324 collective signups and 61 submissions across the aforementioned tracks. 

Decasonic was excited to be a judge at the hackathon, and see some of the incredibly tenacious builders in the Soneium ecosystem aiming to develop Soneium AI projects. Key to the hackathon was the core focus on DeFAI projects and the Creator Economy, the latter of which is a key differentiator of Soneium. It encouraged the development of  creator tools, fan platforms, and onchain media with enhanced agentic systems and integrations in mind. I would like to shout out congratulations to the Kyo Finance team for winning the grand prize, and to congratulate the wider participants in the hackathon. I was incredibly impressed by the quality of participants, and by their desire to advance the state of the Soneium AI ecosystem. 

Mocaverse Network Identity

In March 2025, Mocaverse announced a partnership with Soneium. This partnership aims to develop a decentralized identifier system, or DID for digital identity on the Soneium network. This involves leveraging AI to enhance user engagement, personalization, and data-awareness, providing AI-assisted reputation scoring and personalized experiences for users. 

We believe this partnership eventually evolves to providing AI Agents with their own, dedicated Mocaverse ID on Soneium. This equips agents with a ‘reputation-score’ based on their achievements and target outputs. In addition, a reputation-score for the agents would enable categorization and quality assessment for each of the agents on the network. This allows users to discover agents faster, and to be able to leverage agents based on their relevant, personalized requests. 

UneMeta: Agentic Framework

A key project in onboarding agents to Soneium is UneMeta, a social entertainment platform (SocialFi) project that onboards leading IPs and content onchain to Soneium. It is a self-described “IP-Centric” community layer for Soneium, and was part of the Soneium Spark program. In addition to their IP and entertainment focus, UneMeta developed an AI Agent Framework, enabling developers and users to launch their AI Agents directly on Soneium. 

Zolf: AI Agent Launchpad

In addition to the Agentic Framework provided by UneMeta, the existing Soneium AI Agent Launchpad space is rapidly evolving, with projects aiming to provide a one-click hub for AI Agent deployment. Zolf AI is currently the key AI Agent Launchpad on Soneium, enabling users to design, customize, and deploy AI Agents, each with customized personas. 

Founder-led Support

Sota’s support for the development of projects at the intersection of Web3 x AI goes back to his time at Astar, with dedicated hackathons for builders at the emerging intersection. 

What we observe as a key differentiator with Sota and other founder(s) in the ecosystem is the focus on AI, IP, and ownership. Some of Sota’s most recent support includes expressing support for AI Agents with a universal ID, and wallet ownership for the respective agents. 

Soneium: Key Stats

Currently, the Soneium ecosystem’s TVL stands at $128.16M, with $25.46M of the TVL being in Stablecoins (~20%). The TVL is still growing, and the DEX volume is averaging $30M weekly over the past few weeks. The majority of the volume is driven by Soneium-native project, Kyo Finance with a collective of 21 DeFi projects with a non-zero TVL. Over the past 30D, Soneium has been one of the top 30 chains by fees generated. 

Most of the TVL is driven by bridged ETH, with 10,349 $ETH bridged (~$26.12M) since the mainnet launch of Soneium. The network has also seen significant activity, with over 3.8M total accounts (addresses) created and transactions consistently exceeding 1M per day over the past few months.

Source: Link

Soneium AI Market Map (2025)

Similar to our other market maps focused on Web3 x AI, we map the Soneium AI ecosystem across two axes:

• X-Axis – AI standard layers: Compute → Data → Model → Interface → Application.

• Y-Axis – Target audiences: Web3 Natives, Developers, Users, and Mainstream Audiences.

Note - as with our other market maps, this landscape is continuing to evolve. The current state of the ecosystem is unlikely to remain static over the next few months and years to come. To date, we have identified 40+ projects building Soneium AI categorized based on our three key pillars noted below. 

The Three Pillars of Soneium AI

Infrastructure 

Model Layer

1. Model Framework: SDKs and tools for training or fine-tuning AI models, aimed at simplifying model development.

   1. Allora is a key project at the Model Framework for Soneium. It enables dApp and agent builders to leverage Allora’s network to build model intelligence networks, utilizing community-built machine learning models for accurate, context-aware predictions. 

   
   

Data Layer

1. AI Agent Infrastructure: Infrastructure for on-chain AI Agents to access and independently manage their data usage through on-chain feeds.

   1. SQD builds Data Lake solutions for AI Agents on Soneium, enabling agents to utilize SQD to access petabytes of data from their platform. 

2. Data Oracles: Provides infrastructure for verifiable, on-chain data for dApps, assets, risk metrics, amongst other sources, enabling smart contracts to access real-world data.

   1. A key project building at this intersection on Soneium is ChainSight, which provides data for AI models that is used to train models for predictive analytics, and risk assessment. Their oracles further enable AI Agents to access ChainSight’s data to trigger smart-contract related actions. 

   
   

Compute Layer

Interface Layer

1. AI Agent Launchpad: Platforms to deploy and customize AI agents. Often, those platforms enable one-click deployment of AI Agents with no code required.

   1. Zolf AI is a native Soneium project enabling the one-click deployment of AI Agents. Zolf enables users to customize and train their AI Agents by pre-defining tone, personality, and voice. 

2. Analytics: Analytics platforms that leverage AI to generate insights, often incorporating real-time data parsing, summarization, and predictive intelligence.

   1. Aspecta is a key project on Soneium enabling analytics for reputation attestation, community building, and asset valuation discovery. 

3. MCP: Decentralized Model Contextual Protocols (deMCPs) coordinating AI workloads or agents across distributed servers for collaboration or inference.

   1. CrossMint is a platform well-known for their infrastructure solutions and their GoatSDK Agentic Framework. For Soneium, GoatSDK provides MCP solutions for developers and users.

4. Model Launchpad: dApps to release, share, or monetize AI models with integrated UX, often tied to token distribution and co-ownership. 

   1. An example of a Model Launchpad project on Soneium is Ora, which pioneered the “IMO” model or the Initial Model Offering, introducing a framework that enables AI models to be tokenized.

5. DeFAI: Interfaces at the intersection of AI and DeFi that enable users to execute on-chain transactions through natural language. 

   1. Kyo Finance, a native Soneium DeFi project, a participant in the Soneium Spark program, and the winner of the Agentic Hackathon provides an AI Agent, Agent Kyo which enables cross-chain swaps through natural language (intent execution). 

   
   

Application Layer

1. SocialFi: Applications operating at the intersection of AI and SocialFi, enabling social interactions, creator economies, and on-chain reputation systems. For a comprehensive SocialFi x AI Market Map, refer to our previously published market map here: link.  

   1. A key project on Soneium building at this intersection is SynStation. SynStation is a Spark incubation program participant, and focuses on providing community-driven prediction markets.

2. Vibecoding: Platforms that enable “vibe coding” and the low-code or no-code development of on-chain dApps using AI-assisted tooling and generation.

   1. RairProtocol, which is known for their open-source dApp building engine is building a text to dApp feature for vibe coders that will enable Soneium vibe coders to launch their projects.  

3. GameFi: Gaming applications at the intersection of AI and GameFi, often leveraging agents for gameplay, creation, or economic coordination.  For a comprehensive GameFi x AI Market Map, refer to our previously published market map here: link.  

   1. Evermoon, a Soneium spark program participant, is developing an AI x GameFi ecosystem with multiple AI VTubers for interactive livestreams.

4. Communication: Focused on providing solutions for enabling decentralized infrastructure for dApps. 

   1. DMAIL, known for their communication infrastructure provides a “DMAIL dApp” for self-hosted decentralized mailbox solutions on Soneium. 

5. Agents

   1. Analytics: AI Agents providing analytics and insights, often focused on on-chain data, market trends, or DAO/community metrics.

      1. LiveArt, an NFT and RWA marketplace has an agent that provides real-time intelligence data on sales from Web3 marketplaces and predictive analytics for forecasting art pieces, NFTs, and market trends. 

   2. Companions: AI Agent companions, providing AI Agents for completing personal tasks with memory and context awareness.

      1. Pandora is the company behind Lucia, a hyper-personalized agent companion that streamlines users' information from Discord, Telegram, X and other applications. 

   
   

Why Soneium AI?

We reached out to founders in the Soneium AI ecosystem to ask “Why Soneium?” The co-founder of Kyo Finance told us that Soneium’s key distinguishing feature is its focus on the IP and creator economy, which compounds the experience for mainstream adoption and onboarding, and fits well into the core vision behind many DeFAI projects. 

Opportunities

The Soneium AI ecosystem continues to evolve, and has underexplored opportunities. It remains in its infancy, but we at Decasonic believe it is differentiated and provides an attractive opportunity for consumer-focused AI builders. Considering the three key pillars identified in our market map (Infrastructure, Application, and Interface) layers, 41% fall under Interface, 48% of the projects fall under the Application Layer, and 11% under Infrastructure. From our previous reporting, Soneium is differentiated through the concentration of builders “up the stack” or in the Interface and Application layers of AI. 

Some of the opportunities we believe Soneium is differentiating itself through include:

1. IP AI Agents: Noting the current AI Agent landscape, a lot of agents lack access to a personalized IP that would enable personalized retention. Soneium offers key IP onboarding, with significant IP onboarded from Japanese anime and shows, enabling AI Agents to have distinct personalities based on widely-consumed IPs. 

   1. Sony’s ownership of anime studios and gaming IPs (Aniplex, Final Fantasy, God of War, amongst others) allows Soneium to onboard engaging agents for their community. 

      1. We already see elements of this with Soneium’s Yoake Protocol’s recent Seven Deadly Sins NFT collection. 

   2. Those IP Agents can then be tokenized and monetized, empowering creators and fans to own, trade, license, and use their differentiated, IP-backed agents. 

2. Physical AI: Soneium’s relationship with Sony positions it to be a potential leader in the Physical Web3 x AI market. Its potential access to and integration in millions of devices offered by Sony across consumer electronics, gaming, and computer products positions Soneium to be in a unique position. 

   1. Sony can integrate AI Agents into Sony devices, enabling features such as gaming rewards and personalized media offerings through Web3 enabled hardware. 

3. Consumer AI Apps: Soneium is consumer-focused, with a mission of onboarding billions of users on-chain through a consumer entertainment lens that is focused on adoption. Soneium AI builders can develop AI-driven apps in entertainment, social media, and gaming, leveraging Sony’s brand to onboard billions on-chain through consumer AI apps. 

4. AI x GameFi: Leveraging PlayStation’s ecosystem, Soneium can create immersive, Web3 x GameFi experiences with enhanced AI-personalization. Dynamic NPCs (as AI Agents), enhanced player-liquidity, personalized quests, and onboarding in-game assets as NFTs on Soneium can potentially be done by leveraging PlayStation’s already-existing, massive user-base. 

5. Personalized AI Companions: Builders on Soneium can create personalized AI companions that serve as AI assistants, social companions, or even gaming companions. Those companions can leverage the entire suite of Sony’s ecosystem of devices, and live fluidly between them. They can then leverage Sony’s L2 for secure on-chain data storage, and enable users to upload select elements of their data for potential monetization pathways.

6. AI x SocialFI: On Soneium, builders can create decentralized social platforms that enhance content personalization, creation and user engagement. Soneium has an edge given their OP stack and entertainment-focus lens, alongside the combined distribution pathways that can potentially be made available by Sony. 

   
   

Conclusion

The Soneium AI ecosystem, though in its early stages, continues to rapidly evolve. Few blockchains can match Soneium’s consumer-centric, entertainment-first approach that leverages Sony’s IP, ecosystem of devices, and cultural influence to deliver engaging, personalized, and accessible mainstream experiences.

At Decasonic, we believe the next phase of Web3 x AI adoption will center on the “three Cs” defined as culture, collaboration, and co-ownership. We at Decasonic are a native Web3 x AI venture and digital assets fund focused on partnering with founders and innovators at the intersection of Web3 x AI. If you are a founder, a potential founder, or a partner investor, reach out to us at Decasonic, together, we can shape the future of this rapidly evolving intersection. 

The content of this material is strictly for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to constitute investment advice, nor should it be considered a recommendation or a solicitation to buy, sell, or hold any asset. Decasonic does not endorse investments in any specific tokens, and nothing in these blog posts should be construed as legal, tax, or financial advice. Please consult with a qualified professional advisor before making any financial decisions. Decasonic provides no warranties, whether expressed or implied, on the content provided in these blog posts, including its accuracy, completeness, or correctness. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Decasonic. Please note that Decasonic may hold a position in some of the tokens mentioned, including Virtuals. Decasonic is not liable for any errors or omissions in the content of this material or for any actions taken based on the information provided herein.