Sony has launched yesterday its highly acclaimed Soneium L2 Blockchain. It started off with a rocky road.
Soneium, a new joint venture between Sony Group and Startale Group is built on top of the OP Stack. Previously, Startale Group launched Astar L2 and Astar L1 zkEVM.
Soneium’s “Minato” Testnet started in August 2024. It attracted over 1,700 applications to Spark’s incubator and generated 47 million transactions across 14 million wallets.
Soneium is a chain that has received a lot of attention on Crypto Twitter, but it’s mainly because people are calling for its sequencer-level control to be censored.
Memecoins, which were released on yesterday’s chain, including AIBO (a Sony robot dog created in the 90s), reached an $2.7m market cap 13 hours later before being blocked and censored on Soneium’s block-explorer.
Surprised? Why should you be surprised? Soneium documents show that the chain had already designed a system of tiers to restrict access to its intellectual property. The system will flag potential violations of intellectual property and will enforce RPC-level blocks if not corrected in time.
Soneium restricts the activity of contracts on this list. For example, they will be restricted in their Block Explorer visibility, and excluded from wallets.
But it seems that the L2s were more robust than was widely thought. Users were able, through the sequencer blocks, to activate a forced inclusion mechanism for transactions on Ethereum L1.
When using OP Stack, an EOA (externally held account) wallet may create a L2 transaction, and then call the main OptimismPortal contracts. This will allow submitting a transaction directly to Ethereum’s L1 chain without the need for the centralized sequencer of the L2.
Ethereum researchers sometimes call this mechanism an “escape hatch,” This is a temporary failsafe solution until L2 decentralizes their sequencers.
Justin Drake said on an earlier Bankless podcast that even with a central sequencer, a stage 2 rollup cannot steal or freeze assets the way a custodian can. Real-time censorship-resistance may be compromised, but the ability to force transaction inclusions still grants some explicit level of ownership over assets on L2 chains.
Researchers at Ethereum are tackling the decentralization of sequencers in many ways. These include marketplaces for these devices, like Astria or Espresso, and based rollup designs, which simply pass sequencing to validators L1 (i.e. Based sequencing).
“Based rollups, using Ethereum’s sequencers, offer real-time censorship resistance. Unless censorship resistance is baked in, there will always be risks. While there are risks, we will never see true decentralization, permissionless and security,” Blockworks interviewed Brecht de Vos, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Taiko.
Note that this is not a case of Soneium censoring. “censorship” This is not that different to the types of permissioned blockchains that are already present on Ethereum L2s or Avalanche Subnets.
Soneium’s practical decision is what’s really questionable. The task of attempting to list every IP violation in a permissionless ledger on the blacklist is an impossible one.
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