Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin commented on the controversy on Wednesday SunimEthereum launched by Sony Layer 2 scaling network Which has left some coin traders in a precarious position this week as they try to suppress certain transactions.

“Companies can make very careful choices about how much control they retain versus what they give to users,” Buterin wrote in an article. mail On X (formerly known as Twitter). “But whatever rules they choose, those are the rules.”

Shortly after Soneium officially launched, some users complained in Soneium's Discord that they were unable to transact in two emerging meme currencies called Aibo and Toro, according to DL News.

While the names of the coins echo successively the line of robotic dogs once cherished by Sony and the PlayStation mascot, their associations Smart contracts It quickly became “banned,” according to him Blockscoutso called Explorer block Which enables users to track transactions on the network.

For a moment, it looked like crypto traders might have been cut off from trading. In a post on X, Soneium account male And that her team took “steps to protect intellectual property” by placing “temporary restrictions on certain contracts.”

But as they say, degins find a way.

Luca Dono, researcher at analytics site L2 Beat, Show How Soneium users can bypass network restrictions on .

The dynamic showed how some of Ethereum's layer 2 networks, built on top of Ethereum, are being created with censorship resistance in mind. According to Buterin, Sony effectively designed a “large speed bump,” enabling its serializer to “throttle transactions but not censor them.”

This was stated by Sota Watanabe, Director of Sony Block Solutions Laboratories Decryption Soneium's approach is not an anti-meme coin, but rather a "pro-responsibility" one. He said the network team will implement a grace period for potential blacklisting decisions moving forward.

“As Vitalik Buterin emphasized, the blockchain field must balance innovation with ethical responsibility,” he said. “In this case, the affected contracts directly infringe Sony’s intellectual property rights, requiring swift action to uphold creators’ rights.”

As a layer 2 network, Soneium offers users cheaper and faster transactions than Ethereum by bundling them together and then sending them to the core network once they are processed. In terms of requesting and transmitting these transactions to Ethereum, the process is facilitated by what is known as a Layer 2 network sequencer.

The Soneium network currently has a central serializer, according to L2 beat. This gives the Soneium team greater control over the transactions processed on the network, including the ability to “blacklist” projects via the RPC nodes that support the chain, according to Blog post Published by Sonium.

“Importantly, these measures do not impose censorship on the blockchain itself,” the Soneium team explained. “The blacklist only applies to specific smart contracts in Soneium’s public RPCs and does not prevent users from accessing the chain through other means.”

Soneium is built using OP Stack, a standard open source code base that powers the Optimism ecosystem, which includes Layer 2 base launched by Coinbase and Ink released by the Kraken. The way users can bypass the Soneium sequencer is inherent in the design of the OP Stack.

In the context of memes, intellectual property concerns are often overlooked, as projects seek to informally profit from everything from sausage to People pets. While the Soneium team seems to welcome memes, they seem to be trying to strike a balance between silly memes and serious goals.

A Soneium spokesperson said: “We consider memes to be a powerful tool when developed responsibly and within ethical and legal frameworks.” Decryption. “We are committed to fostering an environment where innovation thrives while ensuring that the rights of creators are protected.”

Ultimately, Buterin did not object to Soneium's design, arguing that fully open systems could coexist within the Ethereum ecosystem alongside those that appear relatively closed.

The important thing is booksis that fully open environments achieve “critical mass” and that “sufficient tools are available for users to understand the characteristics of the on-chain environments in which they spend their time.”

Modified by Andrew Hayward