Sony’s Soneium blockchain has handed day-to-day chain operations to Optimism’s managed service OP Enterprise, freeing its own engineers to build on the tokenized intellectual property roadmap it introduced at Korea Blockchain Week.The deal was announced on September 30 in Seoul, where Sony Block Solutions Labs confirmed it had joined the fully managed tier that OP Labs offers to organizations running chains on the OP Stack. Soneium was already built on the OP Stack, so the change is operational rather than a rebuild, meaning Soneium keeps its own chain and its own engineering input alongside the managed service.Under the agreement, OP Labs takes over deployment, sequencer operations, node infrastructure, monitoring, software upgrades and incident response. The service-level agreement commits to a 99.9 percent monthly uptime target with 24/7 on-call response. Soneium keeps ownership of the chain, authority over its roadmap and control of product decisions. The uptime figure is a contractual target for the service, not a reported measure of how the network has actually performed so far.
What Soneium is trying to build
Soneium’s focus is onchain entertainment, and the clearest application is tokenized intellectual property. The blockchain lets rights holders register songs, illustrations, anime and game characters as onchain assets with licensing terms attached to the tokens themselves, so the permissions travel with the asset rather than sitting in a separate legal document.The most visible prior work was a 2025 collaboration with YOAKE and OpenSea on anime NFTs tied to “The Seven Deadly Sins: Cursed by Light,” where fans minted limited-edition collectibles tied to a licensed property. That launch showed there is appetite for this kind of content onchain, but also that rights negotiation can be the hardest part of anime IP drops.
ERC-8432: licensing that agents can read
On October 6, Soneium published support for a proposed Ethereum standard, ERC-8432, that would give AI agents and applications a shared interface for checking intellectual property licenses.The standard was posted to Ethereum Magicians on September 28. It proposes that independent registries identify IP assets, publish machine-readable license terms and record license agreements onchain, addressed by a combination of chain ID, registry and asset ID so any application can locate them uniquely across networks.The practical logic is straightforward. AI agents can already find a song, clip or illustration and reuse it in seconds. Working out what they are allowed to do with it is harder, because that information lives in contracts and platform databases that no agent can query directly. A shared registry interface would let a company integrate once and have its AI agents work with every compliant registry.Rights holders gain a way to be discoverable by every catalogue, marketplace and agent that speaks the standard, which is the actual revenue argument. A rights holder who registers tokenized IP under an agreed interface does not need bespoke integration for each platform.
Why Sony is putting money behind this
Sony Ventures put $13 million into Startale Group in January 2026 through the Sony Innovation Fund, an investment that sits alongside the Soneium work rather than replacing it. Startale came out of the Astar Foundation and is Soneium’s infrastructure partner, co-developing the layer-2 chain with Sony Block Solutions Labs.Sony’s wider crypto strategy runs on more than one track. Sony Bank has filed for a Connectia Trust cryptocurrency banking charter and is working on a dollar-backed stablecoin aimed at gaming and anime payments, potentially an alternative to card fees for subscriptions and in-game purchases.Yuji Kumagai of Soneium Protocol confirmed that the network will keep developing its own technology even with OP Labs running the operational side. “We keep shaping Soneium’s technology ourselves,” he said in the company’s statement. OP Labs chief executive Jing Wang said the point of the arrangement is to let Soneium’s team concentrate on products rather than firefight infrastructure.
The bigger picture
Soneium is also building a partner roster for tokenized IP. K-pop company DayOneDream has been named as a partner for artist IP tokenization, and Sony’s broader entertainment assets, from anime to PlayStation, give the chain a potential catalogue most competitors lack.The OP Enterprise deal does not cover interoperability or cross-chain functions, which Soneium still handles separately. That distinction matters for any application that needs to move IP assets between chains.Unlike Optimism’s Superchain, Soneium does not join a shared sequencer or shared gas market, so it runs as an independent OP Stack deployment with outside help on operations rather than as part of a common namespace.Tokenized IP is not a new pitch. What has changed in 2026 is the AI layer, because agents that scrape or sample content at scale need a machine-readable way to know what they can legally use. Onchain licensing is one attempt at such an answer.Whether tokenized IP works as a business model depends on two things: genuine rights holders putting real licences onchain, and AI agents or aggregators actually querying the registry instead of scraping platforms. The ERC-8432 draft points that way, but it remains a proposal, not a standard.For regulators, machine-readable licensing could also make enforcement and compliance auditing simpler, since permission terms would be queryable in one place rather than buried in platform-specific terms of service.Infrastructure is rarely the headline in crypto, but it often decides whether an entertainment product ships on schedule. Soneium’s bet is that a 99.9 percent uptime contract with OP Labs buys its engineers enough focus to turn tokenized IP into a real product rather than a slide in a keynote.