In this episode of Unhashed Podcast, Kenzi speaks to Sota Watanabe, Founder of Astar Network, on being a Japanese founder in the crypto world, parameters that affect Web3 company valuations the most, the multichain future and the exciting new projects at Astar. Here are edited excerpts of the episode.

Before Sota Watanabe founded Astar Network in Japan in 2018, he studied information technology at the San Francisco State University in the US. He then worked at a blockchain startup, Chronicled, in the San Francisco Bay Area. After returning to Japan, he worked as a blockchain researcher at the University of Tokyo. But when Gavin Wood, the creator of Ethereum and Polkadot, visited Japan and talked about Web3, Sota decided to make Astar the Future of Smart Contracts for Multichain Hub on the Polkadot blockchain network.