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Yesterday, Sony launched the highly acclaimed Soneium L2 blockchain. It was a bit of a rocky start.
It is built on top of the OP stack, Sunim It is a joint venture launched by Sony Group and Startel Group. The latter previously launched the Astar Network L1 and Astar L2 zkEVM.
Soneium's "Minato" testnet went live in August 2024 and attracted more than 1,700 applicants to Spark sitterWhile it received 47 million transactions across 14 million active wallets.
However, what has put Soneium in the spotlight on Crypto Twitter are calls for on-chain level censorship.
Memecoins launched on-chain yesterday, as AIBO, and traded at a market cap of $2.7 million 13 hours after launch before they went live. Controlled By the Soneium serializer and blocked on the Chain Block Explorer (Ibo It is a robotic dog developed by Sony in the 1990s).
Surprised? It shouldn't be like that. According to Sunium Documentsthe chain has already planned a tiered restriction system to protect intellectual property rights. This system flags potential intellectual property violations and will impose bans at the RPC level if they are not resolved in time:
Their activities on contract addresses in this list will be restricted on Soneium, for example via RPC-level blocks, limited visibility on Block Explorer and exclusion from wallets.
However, L2s have been shown to be more flexible than was widely thought. The blockchain backfired, as users were able to trigger the forced transaction inclusion mechanism on Ethereum L1.
For OP Stack chains, any EOA (externally owned account) wallet can create an L2 transaction and call the master key Gateway to optimism contract, allowing the transaction to be submitted to Ethereum L1 without Through the L2 central sequencer.
This mechanism is sometimes referred to by Ethereum researchers as “Escape hatch", a fail-safe temporary solution waiting for L2 pools that decentralize their serializers.
As Justin Drake said previously Without a Bank Podcasteven a Stage 2 Aggregation using a central serializer cannot freeze or steal assets like a central custodian can. Resistance to real-time censorship may be compromised, but the ability to force the listing of transactions still grants a clear level of asset ownership in L2 chains.
Serialization decentralization is being addressed by Ethereum researchers in a myriad of ways, such as blockchain marketplaces like Astria and Espresso, or block designs based on deferring serialization duties to L1 validators (e.g. Existing sequence).
“Ethereum blockchain-based blockchains provide resistance to real-time censorship. Unless censorship resistance is strengthened, there will always be risks. Although there are risks, "We will never see true decentralization and permissionless security."
Putting aside the thorny debate over whether it is appropriate for Soneium to impose censorship, note that such “censorship” is not all that different from the types of permissioned chains that already exist such as Ethereum L2s and on Avalanche subnets.
What's really questionable is Soneium's decision from a practical perspective. Trying to blacklist every intellectual property violation in an unauthorized registry is an extremely complex task with no end in sight.
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