Sony-Backed Soneium Unveils ERC-8432 AI Licensing Standard and Token Plan

Soneium's Plan for Machine-Paid Royalties

Coders, musicians and rights holders could soon be paid by AI systems without sending an invoice. On Monday, October 26, Soneium, the blockchain venture backed by Sony and built with Japanese crypto firm Startale, announced a licensing system that lets creators register their work on-chain so AI programs can verify license terms and arrange payments automatically. The announcement, posted on the Soneium blog, frames the project as an on-chain entertainment economy in which licensing terms sit beside the work itself, so a machine can check what it may use and settle the fee in the same flow. Its technical anchor is ERC-8432, a proposed Ethereum standard for machine-readable licensing, which Soneium says it will support; a standard of that kind defines how a license is written so software, not a lawyer, reads it first. The system targets Japan's content industries in particular, where music, anime and character franchises generate rights income at scale. Registration on the chain gives each work a verifiable record, so questions about who used what, and under which terms, can be checked against the ledger itself. The entertainment reach goes further than royalties. Fans can invest in the Moriusa character franchise through tokens, and a partnership with K-pop company DayOneDream aims to open investments tied to concert royalties. “We will help them fund their next work at a new scale,” Soneium Protocol Head Yuji Kumagai said of the creators the system is meant to serve. The network also confirmed plans for its own cryptocurrency, though the SONEIUM token has no confirmed launch date and no AI company has yet signed on to the proposed licensing system. Those gaps matter, because the pitch asks AI developers to accept payment rails they did not design, on a chain they have no reason yet to prefer.

Sony shares have yet to price any of this in. COINOTAG data shows the stock at $26.02, down 0.95% over the past 24 hours and trading inside a $25.60 to $26.45 range. The nearest resistance overhead sits at $26.16 and scores 81 out of 100 on COINOTAG's composite rating, while the strongest support below is $24.36 at 78 out of 100. The daily trend still reads as an uptrend, with the 14-day RSI at 67.4, so the market is extended but has not broken down. A close above $26.16 would extend the run; losing $24.36 would say investors want revenue proof before they follow the announcement.

$9.4 Million Left in Soneium DeFi

The initiative arrives on a network where the money has already left. Deposits in Soneium's decentralized finance applications have fallen 95%, from $203 million in May 2025 to roughly $9.4 million, according to on-chain data tracked by DefiLlama. At the May 2025 peak, deposits ran more than twenty times higher than they do today. Four applications drove that earlier high: Kyo Finance, Sonex, Untitled Bank and Sake Finance together held about $159 million and hold around $1.5 million now. The network processed 163,691 transactions in a 24-hour window while generating just $118 in revenue, a usage-to-income gap that our guide to blockchain revenue and profit treats as the basic test for any young chain. DefiLlama's deposit figures do not measure every asset held on Soneium, so the chain's full economy is wider than these numbers, but the direction is not in doubt. The copyright fight behind the technology is already live as well, and it involves the same corporations the licensing system hopes to serve. Sony Music sued AI music generator Udio for a second time in July, alleging infringement involving more than 30,000 recordings, and statutory damages could exceed $4.5 billion if Sony prevailed across all claims. The dispute is, at bottom, about intellectual property that AI systems used without paying. Universal Music and Warner Music took another path: both struck licensing agreements with Udio with no blockchain in the middle. Soneium's system, in effect, proposes to automate through code the settlements its rivals are reaching through contracts. What remains open is the part that decides the outcome: no AI developer has committed to the standard, and the SONEIUM token still has no launch date.