Astar Network (“Astar”) is Japan's most popular smart contract platform, serving as a parachain for Polkadot. Polkadot gives parachain projects full control over their underlying blockchain itself. This flexibility gives developers working on Astar the maximum freedom to optimize for any use case. 

Astar is one of the most flexible platforms in the Polkadot ecosystem, allowing asset bridges and message-passing protocols to other major blockchains like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Cosmos, Polygon, and more. 

Astar is friendly to all kinds of developers and has a large international ecosystem building on its platform, with a primarily Asia-based core team. 

After the launch of their token in early 2022, Astar was looking to grow the team and establish a bigger presence in the US.

Working with US talent and regulations

Astar quickly realized that the US talent market was very different from hiring in Asia. To attract and retain top talent, Astar had to find a way to ensure it can provide full-time employment, access to benefits coverage (typically not available and/or expensive for independent contractors), and assurance that taxes on compensation in a mix of a native token ($ASTR), stablecoins and fiat are withheld and paid. 

After finding other options available on the market inadequate or not compliant, Astar decided to partner with Toku.

A compliant and easy experience

Toku ensures Astar employees are hired and compensated in line with US laws and state-specific regulations, taking care of everything from employee registration with the appropriate government agencies and filing federal and state tax forms through running payroll, generating payslips, and more.

With Toku’s employment and compensation solutions, Astar US team members and new hires get all the benefits of full-time employment, including state-compliant employment contracts, access to healthcare and social security, and tax-compliant payroll.
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The partnership with Toku also provides Astar’s leadership team a guarantee and peace of mind that all withholding calculations on compensation in ASTR token, stablecoins and fiat, sell-to-cover, and Income, Social Security, or Medicare tax payments in a number of different states are done accurately and on time. With Toku’s solutions and team support, Astar saves more than 30 hours per month on operational admin and can keep its Finance team lean.

Currently, Astar continues to grow its team beyond Asia and US and works with Toku on hiring and compensating its all new hires across jurisdictions.