"The Soneium situation is a good live demonstration of how launching an ethereum L2 is great for businesses *and* users" - a take by Vitalik

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin used Sony’s new Ethereum Layer 2 network Soneium as a case study in how corporate L2s can simultaneously serve business interests and user needs, while making all tradeoffs explicit on-chain. In a post on X, he described the “Soneium situation” as a “good live demonstration” of this dynamic, highlighting that L2 architectures let companies choose precisely how much control they retain—such as throttling or blacklisting certain assets—while keeping the rules transparent, auditable, and enforceable by code rather than discretionary off-chain decisions. Soneium, built on Optimism’s OP Stack and launched on mainnet in January after a high-usage Minato testnet, has sparked controversy for blacklisting or restricting trading of certain memecoins, prompting accusations of censorship and centralization. Buterin framed this not as a failure of the model, but as an example of how an L2 can be designed as a hybrid system: the sequencer can “throttle but not censor,” and users retain the ability—albeit with a “large speed bump”—to transact on the L2 within clearly codified rules. He argued that such business-grade L2s create a “free market” of blockchain environments, ranging from fully closed to fully open, so long as two conditions are preserved: a critical mass of activity remains in fully open systems, and users have sufficient information and tools to understand the constraints of any platform they choose to use.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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