As Astar enters into 2026, it is important to clearly explain how the ecosystem is organized and how responsibilities are distributed. This post outlines the structure of the Astar Collective, the contributors involved, and the roles they play in supporting the long term sustainability of Astar.
The Astar Collective brings together contributors, governance bodies, and community participants. Responsibilities are distributed across operations, governance, and coordination, with alignment maintained through onchain governance and ecosystem oversight.
The Astar Foundation, led by Maarten Henskens, provides long term stewardship for the Astar ecosystem.
The Astar Foundation responsibilities include branding, official communications, marketing, business development, ecosystem strategy, community programs, financial and asset management, token sustainability, infrastructure coordination, website and portal maintenance, and coordination and oversight of product and core development efforts for the benefit of the Astar Collective. The Foundation plays a central role in aligning contributors and guiding execution as the ecosystem evolves.
Startale Group
The Startale Group, led by Sota Watanabe, founder of Astar Network, contributes to the Astar ecosystem as a business, technical, and infrastructure partner.
This includes infrastructure maintenance, technical support, research collaboration, and ecosystem expansion initiatives such as Soneium integration. Startale Group also works closely with the Astar Foundation on business development initiatives across Japan, the US, and other regions, while the Foundation continues to conduct business development independently and in coordination with other ecosystem partners.
Governance Bodies and Community Roles
Onchain governance bodies are responsible for decision making and oversight across the ecosystem.
These include:
Main Council
Oversees governance coordination, onchain treasury oversight, and proposal flow, ensuring that decisions across committees and collectives align with the long term direction of the ecosystem.
Astar Finance Committee (AFC)
Responsible for financial governance, DAO treasury oversight, asset management, and financial decision making in line with onchain governance outcomes.
Astar Community Council (ACC)
Focuses on community related initiatives, participation frameworks, dApp Staking oversight, ecosystem programs, and representing community interests within the broader governance process.
Technical Committee
Provides technical oversight of the network, including protocol level decisions, runtime upgrades, and safeguarding network stability when technical intervention is required.
Ambassadors support local community engagement and outreach. Token holders participate through governance voting, forum discussions, and ongoing contributions to ecosystem dialogue.
Ecosystem Participants
Astar’s stability and growth also depend on a wide range of ecosystem participants who contribute across the network on an ongoing basis.
These participants include, but are not limited to:
Node operators and collators, ensuring the security, availability, and performance of the network through the operation and maintenance of critical infrastructure.
Infrastructure and tooling providers, supporting developers and users through RPC services, indexers, explorers, wallets, and other foundational tools required for reliable network operation.
Developers and contributors, who maintain core components, build applications, improve tooling, and experiment with new primitives that expand Astar’s technical and product capabilities.
Project teams and ecosystem builders, delivering applications, integrations, and user facing products that drive real world usage and adoption of Astar.
These participants operate across different layers of the stack and often contribute without formal mandates. Their work is nevertheless essential to maintaining network reliability, enabling innovation, and supporting effective execution across the ecosystem.
Communication and Information Sources
Official updates, announcements, and strategic direction for Astar are communicated through official Astar channels. These include the Astar Forum, the Astar blog, and official Astar social accounts.
Content shared by individual contributors or organisations reflects their respective areas of work and perspective.
Closing
As reflected in recent Astar publications, the ecosystem has spent the past year strengthening its foundations of the Collective.
The Astar Collective model enables multiple contributors to operate with clear responsibilities, while the Astar Foundation provides coordination and long term stewardship. This structure supports Astar’s global ambitions, including continued expansion in Japan, while maintaining clarity and accountability across the ecosystem.
While this post reflects the current structure of the ecosystem, the Collective remains open to new participants who wish to take on greater responsibility through sustained contribution, governance participation, and ecosystem involvement.
Thank you for clearly outlining the current collective structure!
I recently held an AMA with Sota, and during that discussion we touched on the topic of a separation between the Astar Foundation and Startale after Burndrop. I understand that this may not be fully finalized yet, but I think it would be much easier to understand if there were an explanation of the underlying intent.
My current understanding is as follows:
For some time, decision-making within the Astar Foundation has been significantly influenced by the intentions of Startale as a company.
As a result, this created obstacles (including unintended ones) to decision-making that was purely focused on growing the Astar ecosystem from the perspective of the Astar Foundation.
Therefore, decision-making will be fully led by the Astar Foundation, and to enable this, it will separate from Startale in this respect (with teams being fully or almost fully separated).
Startale will remain in a cooperative relationship, but will not be involved in decision-making, instead existing as a partner within the collective, focused on development, business, and technical aspects.
From the high level it’s correct but I would like to add some things to give a better understanding to many readers of this thread. A lot of nuances get lost in translation loops whereas someone’s understanding, because of wrong interpretation of a translation, can create a lot of confusion.
A great example of it should be is the AMA of @you425 with Sota, whereas You425 created the translation to ensure non-Japanese members get an overview of the questions and answers without them using their own tools. Those tools don’t get some nuance from the Japanese language. With this action from You, he was sure, the translation was spot on.
Decision-making is done by the Collective related to Astar as a protocol but Astar Foundation will make it’s own decision as a body from the Collective. Whereas, Sota, founder of Astar Network, is still included in the direction set by Astar Foundation but not Startale as an entity.
As example, 3 weeks ago, Astar Foundation had a formal meeting with Startale leadership to explain our plans for 2026. The Astar Foundation listened to feedback and adjusted based on that feedback. We do this to ensure the vision of mission of Astar that is still in the DNA of Sota, lives further and Astar keeps it’s integrity that was part of our values from day 1.
To conclude something that is still a concern for many, Sota is still part of Astar and will always be.
Hi @Maarten , thanks for taking the time to publish this post and for the clarifications shared in the comments.
I wanted to share how I personally arrived at a clearer understanding after reading everything, because before this there were a few points that honestly felt a bit unclear to me — and I suspect I wasn’t the only one.
Over the past weeks, with different discussions and statements circulating, I found it difficult to fully understand how the relationship between Astar, the Astar Foundation, Startale, and Sota should be interpreted, and how concepts like Burndrop fit into the long-term picture. The pieces were there, but it wasn’t always easy to see how they connected.
This post, together with your follow-up explanations, helped put those pieces back together. It’s now much clearer to me that the Astar Foundation provides long-term stewardship and coordination for the ecosystem, that Startale remains part of the Astar Collective and continues to contribute closely alongside the Foundation, and that Sota himself remains deeply connected to Astar’s vision and long-term direction.
It also became clear that there is no coordinated merge or token swap, and that Burndrop exists as a structured mechanism designed to strengthen the value of ASTR, rather than as a path toward any kind of protocol or token merger.
With this context, the overall direction feels much more coherent and reassuring. I really appreciate the effort to clearly explain how the different roles and responsibilities fit together, as this kind of clarity makes it much easier for the community to stay aligned and engaged.
Thanks again for the transparency and for taking the time to clarify these points.
Despite the fact that multiple elements and entities are involved, I think the situation has been summarized and organized in a way that is relatively easy to understand.
That said, we are operating in an environment of extremely rapid change. Even if this is the situation, policy, and strategy as of early 2026, it is important not to assume that things will remain this way permanently. I believe it will be beneficial for each entity to continue working together with flexibility so we can adapt to market shifts and other changes as they arise.
We have a lot of potential to overcome the obstacles that lie ahead and highly skilled people behind us. I hope that 2026 will be Astar’s year. We have what it takes to succeed.
