Sony of Japan is launching a full-scale on-chain strategy for intellectual property (IP) centered on its Ethereum Layer 2 network, 'Soneium.' This move is interpreted as an attempt to restructure the entertainment industry itself by moving core content assets—such as music, animation, games, and movies—onto the blockchain.
According to the Japanese media outlet Nada News, Sony has set IP on-chaining as a major strategic objective for this year and is accelerating the construction of infrastructure based on Soniium. The core of the initiative is to go beyond the simple adoption of technology and transition the entire process of IP management, distribution, and monetization to a blockchain structure.
The core of this strategy is the "digitalization of IP." While content rights—such as music, video, and games—were previously tied to centralized platforms or contract structures, the transition to on-chain technology enables the direct recording of ownership and transaction records on the blockchain. This is considered a factor that can fundamentally change global distribution, secondary trading, and royalty distribution methods.
In particular, Sony is known to be going beyond simply building technological infrastructure to simultaneously designing relevant legal and regulatory frameworks. This suggests that IP on-chaining is not merely an experimental phase, but a strategy for "entry into the institutional framework" premised on actual industrial application.
Sony is also set to expand the Sonium ecosystem by attracting external capital. Increased investment is expected in various fields, including applications combining entertainment and blockchain, fan-participatory platforms, and NFT-based content services.
The market views this move as the "next stage of WRA (Real Asset Tokenization)." This is because the trend of tokenization, which has so far centered on financial assets such as gold, bonds, and real estate, is expanding to intangible assets like IP.
IP is an asset with high liquidity and scalability based on a recurring revenue structure and a global fandom. For this reason, when combined with blockchain, it has a high potential to create new markets, such as fan-participatory economic models or revenue-sharing structures for derivative works, going beyond the simple recording of ownership.
Consequently, Sony's strategy can be viewed not merely as the adoption of blockchain, but as an attempt to shift the content industry from a 'platform-centric' to a 'protocol-centric' model. If other global media companies adopt similar strategies in the future, there is a possibility that the entire IP market could be restructured into an on-chain basis.
