Plasm rebrands to Astar Network in pursuit of becoming a Polkadot-native DApp Hub.
Welcome to our next chapter. Today, we are thrilled to announce a rebrand to our new name, Astar Network.
From Plasm to Astar Network
We have been developing Plasm for more than 2 years. Initially, our focus was solely to implement Layer 2 technology in Polkadot, but our vision has expanded. Layer 2 is now just one element in our innovative development pipeline. Currently, our platform is a dApp hub that supports Etherem Virtual Machine, WebAssembly, and layer2 solutions.
From today, we enter a new chapter. A Star is born. Plasm becomes Astar Network in pursuit of becoming a Polkadot-native, multi-chain dApp hub that supports both Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly.
We will use this new brand name for our Polkadot Parachain, and the network will be deployed once we win the Polkadot Parachain auction. Our team assumes there will be some questions regarding this new rebrand — we’ll be making a post shortly on our forum answering many of these.
As a first step, we will explain the reason why we rebrand in this crowdcast on the 30th (1 PM UTC）
What is Astar Network?
Astar Network is a multi-chain dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum Virtual Machine, WebAssembly, and Layer2 solutions. Astar is designed to have all the necessary features to become an ecosystem for smart contracts on Polkadot. Among them, the features we recognize as particularly important are X-VM (Cross Virtual Machine) and dApp Staking.
X-VM
We believe that WebAssembly is the future of smart contracts, but Ethereum Virtual Machine is currently important. A lot of existing projects have been developing smart contracts by using Solidity. However, many new projects in the Polkadot ecosystem use ink! since Polkadot supports WebAssembly by design. Under these circumstances, a platform that supports both Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly will get more and more important. This is where Astar Network comes in. We not only support both virtual machines but also make them interactive. A Solidity smart contract on our Ethereum Virtual Machine can call ink! smart contract on WebAssembly seamlessly and vice versa in the future.
DApp Staking
DApp Staking is the most important feature that only Astar Network supports in the Polkadot ecosystem. We believe that this is going to be a huge differentiator for DApps looking to build on Polkadot. All smart contract developers on Astar Network can receive our native token as a reward.
Astar Network’s Vision
From the beginning, we’ve aimed to make an open, transparent, and decentralized network that acts as a fundamental protocol to realize Web3.0. We believe that Polkadot is the protocol for Web3.0, but the network doesn’t support smart contract functionality by design. This is where Astar Network comes in.
Astar Network is a Polkadot-native smart contract hub. When it comes to smart contracts, there are two important things. The first one is Ethereum compatibility since Ethereum is the biggest smart contract ecosystem. However, we believe that Ethereum compatibility won’t be a differentiator since this feature can be supported by many Polkadot parachains. And given that there are a lot of EVM compatible layer1 blockchains and Ethereum layer2 solutions, it is not unique if we make another EVM compatible chain. Hence, Astar supports both Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly and makes them interactive with one another.
The second important thing is scalability. We are making Astar Network for billions of people. Currently, less than 1 % of people are using blockchains but block spaces are already almost full. We need a better solution, and that’s why we’re working on layer2 solutions like Rollups, Plasma, and more.
Astar has these features and aims to become a Polkadot-native smart contract platform.
Next Step
We will launch Astar Portal shortly, allowing developers to deploy smart contracts directly.
Secondly, we’ve launched the Builders Program, which we’ll be rolling out. The main objective of the builders program is to help further the growth, development, and adoption of the Shiden Network by supporting teams that are building on Shiden. The program is headed by Stake Technologies with guidance from Parity Technologies under the Builders for Builders initiative.
Let’s make A rising Star together.
About Astar
Astar Network is a dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum and layer 2 solutions like ZK Rollups. Astar aims to be a multi-chain smart contract platform that will support multiple blockchains and virtual machines like EVM and WASM.
