The much-anticipated Sony Group's Ethereum Layer 2 Soneium has recently launched its mainnet, but has immediately sparked controversy. Generally speaking, the public's biggest doubts about Layer 2 giants venturing into blockchain are twofold: first, how much resources the group is willing to invest in blockchain, or whether it is merely experimental. Secondly, there are concerns about centralization, which are evident in Deutsche Bank's Layer2. The controversy over Soneium is also the latter, as the public chain can review token contracts at the RPC stage and refuse to approve their execution.
(Analysis of the infrastructure of blockchain RPC and the features of Pocket Network)
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ToggleSoneium will freeze tokens, and does not have censorship-resistant properties
Polynomial co-founder @gauthamzzz shared some of the controversies surrounding the launch of Soneium on Twitter, stating that if you create a token on Soneium, the public chain will review the token contract and refuse to approve the execution of transactions at the RPC stage. If they don't like your token contract, you will receive a rejection response, and they won't tell you what's wrong with the token contract.
When Soneium decides to reject the execution of a transaction, the early traders of the token cannot sell their tokens, suffering losses.
L2beat researcher bypassed L2 to execute transactions on L1
The person involved, Donnoh, explained that he created the $aibo token, which is the registered name of the Sony-developed robot dog, following the standard token launch process on the Soneium DEX dyorswap, but was immediately prohibited from creating the token.
However, Donnoh is not an ordinary person, he is a researcher at L2beat. Therefore, he tried to use the features of the OP Stack to bypass Layer2 and execute transactions on the Ethereum mainnet.
Soneium special rule: strict review of IP protection
Soneium also explained that the rules of this chain place special emphasis on IP protection, and although they encourage applications such as meme coins, if there is any suspicion of infringement, the token contract will be blacklisted at the RPC stage. However, this blacklist is reversible, meaning that tokens can still be successfully launched after making the necessary changes to comply with Soneium's rules, and there is already one case that has successfully unlocked.
Soneium also announced IP-related rules, including:
Prohibited use of names: Asset names, stock codes or images cannot reference other companies, projects, individuals or protected entities (such as Sony).
Prohibited use of copyrighted content: Specific images, characters, artists, games, products or other copyrighted materials cannot be used without authorization.
Specifically, there is a 12-hour grace period for token issuance, during which time if a token is found to have infringement concerns, it will first be moved to the suspicious token list, and the official will then send an early notification to the developer. The notification will include detailed reasoning to explain why the token is prohibited. Token developers can interact directly with the official team and resolve the issue within the grace period. If the issue is not resolved within this time limit, the token will be moved to the blacklist. The official has also set up a committee to review the relevant regulations.
OP Stack L2 all have censorship-resistant properties
@gauthamzzz stated that this is the important design of the OP Stack, which forces each Layer 2 to inherit Ethereum's security guarantees. Soneium can try to review at the RPC layer, but they cannot prevent users from forcibly executing transactions through L1. This is not a hacking trick, but the inherent design of the OP Stack, so all Layer2s using this tool inherit the censorship-resistant property.
Binji, the head of the NFT department at Optimism, also stated that a centralized sequencer cannot fully censor, as users can always forcibly execute Layer2 transactions through Layer1.
Vitalik Buterin also believes that the Soneium case perfectly demonstrates the great flexibility that Ethereum Layer2 provides in terms of defining public chain rules for enterprises, regardless of whether they choose open or closed ecosystems, users can choose based on their understanding of the rules.
In fact, similar rule-making is more evident on Deutsche Bank's Layer2.
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