Vitalik Buterin Says Sony's Controversial L2 Shows Why Ethereum Is Great for Business

“Businesses can make very fine-grained choices around how much control they keep vs. give to users,” Buterin wrote in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter). “But whatever rules they choose, that's what the rules are.”

Not long after Soneium officially launched, some users griped within Soneium’s Discord that they were unable to transact in two nascent meme coins called Aibo and Toro, per DL News.

While the coins’ names respectively riffed on Sony’s once-cherished line of robotic dogs and a PlayStation mascot, their associated smart contracts quickly became “forbidden,” according to Blockscout, a so-called block explorer that enables users to track transactions on the network.

It appeared, for a moment, that meme coin traders may have been cut off. In a post on X, Soneium’s account stated that its team had taken “steps to safeguard intellectual property” by placing “temporary restrictions on certain contracts.”

But as they say, degens find a way.

Luca Donno, a researcher at the analytics website L2 Beat, showed how Soneium users could bypass the network’s restrictions on X. Instead of trying to transact on Soneium itself, where users faced hurdles, they could instead force transactions through directly on Ethereum’s network with a little technical know-how—though the transactions faced a 12-hour delay.

The dynamic showcased how some Ethereum layer-2 networks, which are built on top of Ethereum, are constructed with censorship resistance in mind. According to Buterin, Sony effectively designed “a large speed bump,” enabling its sequencer to “throttle transactions but not censor” them.

Sota Watanabe, director of Sony Block Solutions Labs, told Decrypt that Soneium’s approach is not anti-meme coin, but rather “pro-responsibility.” Moving forward, he said the network’s team would implement a grace period for potential blacklisting decisions.

"As Vitalik Buterin has emphasized, the blockchain space must balance innovation with ethical responsibility," he said. "In this case, the affected contracts directly infringed on Sony’s intellectual property, 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 submitting them to the underlying network once processed. In terms of ordering these transactions and relaying them to Ethereum, the process is facilitated by what’s known as a layer-2 network’s sequencer.

Soneium’s network currently has a centralized sequencer, according to L2 Beat. That gives Soneium’s team greater control over which transactions are processed on the network, including the ability to “blacklist” projects via RPC nodes that support the chain, according to a blog post published by Soneium.

“Importantly, these actions do not censor the blockchain itself,” Soneium’s team highlighted. “The blacklisting only applies to specific smart contracts on Soneium's public RPCs and does not prevent users from accessing the chain through other means.”

Soneium is built using the OP Stack, a standard, open-source codebase that powers Optimism’s ecosystem, which includes the Coinbase-launched layer-2 Base and the Kraken-launched Ink. The method through which users could bypass Soneium’s sequencer is inherent to the OP Stack’s design.

Within the context of meme coins, intellectual property concerns are often overlooked, as projects seek to capitalize, unofficially, on everything from hotdogs to people’s pets. While Soneium’s team appears welcoming of meme coins, it appears that they are trying to strike a balance between silly coins and serious goals.

“We view meme coins as a powerful tool when developed responsibly and within ethical and legal frameworks,” a Soneium spokesperson told Decrypt. “We are committed to fostering an environment where innovation thrives while ensuring the rights of creators are protected.”

At the end of the day, Buterin took no issue with Soneium’s design, arguing that fully open systems can coexist within Ethereum’s ecosystem alongside those that appear relatively closed.

What’s important, he wrote, is that fully open environments achieve “critical mass” and that “enough tools are available for users to understand the properties of the on-chain environments they are spending their time in.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward