Vitalik Buterin Says Sony &#039, s Controversial L2 Shows Why Ethereum Is Great for Business

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, spoke on Wednesday about the controversy surrounding Soneium, a Sony-launched Ethereum layer-2 ramping system, which has left some joke coin traders in the dark this week as they try to halt some transactions.

In a post on X ( previously known as Twitter ), Buterin wrote that “businesses can make very fine-grained choices about how much control they keep versus how much control they give users.” ” But whatever laws they choose, that’s what the regulations are”.

Some customers complained within Soneium’s Discord not being able to trade in the two emerging meme currencies Aibo and Toro shortly after Soneium’s official launch, according to

While the cash ‘ names were riffed on Sony’s once-cherished series of robotic dogs and a PlayStation symbol, their associated smart arrangements quickly turned out to be “forbidden,” according to Blockscout, a network-based so-called stop adventurer that enables people to track purchases on the system.

It appeared, for a minute, that image coin dealers may have been cut off. In a post on X, Soneium’s accounts stated that its crew had taken” steps to safeguard academic home” by placing “temporary limitations on certain agreements”.

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. Users could instead force transactions through Ethereum’s network with a little technical know-how rather than try to transact on Soneium itself, where the transactions had 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 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”.

Soneium, which acts as a layer-2 network, bundles the transactions that Ethereum does by sending them together before submitting them to the underlying network when finished. This results in lower and faster transactions for users. 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. According to a blog post Soneium published on the network, this gives Soneium’s team more control over how transactions are processed on the network, including the ability to “blacklist” projects using RPC nodes that support the chain.

” 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 stop 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. The team behind Soneium appears to be welcoming of meme coins, but it seems like they are striking a balance between silly coins and serious goals.

Meme coins are viewed by us as powerful tools when properly and ethically developed, according to a Soneium spokesman. We “are committed to ensuring the protection of the rights of creators while fostering an environment where innovation thrives.”

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. &nbsp,

What’s crucial, 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.”