Soneium (N/A)

Soneium is an Ethereum Layer 2 network founded by one of the world’s largest tech companies, Sony Corporation, in collaboration with the Web3 innovator Startale. It is designed to empower individuals and communities to collaborate and create decentralized applications within its protocol, leveraging Sony's global reach and Startale's blockchain prowess.

Sony Ethereum L2 is built on the Optimistic Stack and a part of the Optimism Superchain ecosystem, which allows the network to maintain a high level of scalability, offering cheap and quick transactions while being fully EVM-compatible for every dApp or EVM-based Web3 wallet. 

Conversely, Optimism Superchain includes Base, Blast, Optimism itself, and Mode blockchain networks which are ranked 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 8th among other L2s by the TVL. Such performance showcases how users and developers, despite the appearance of more supreme technology, zkEVM, still tend to interact with Optimism-based L2 networks as it is more compatible with Ethereum dApps and scalable enough to offer low-cost fee transactions.    

Building within the Optimism ecosystem, Sony’s crypto startup has made ambitious plans to bring Sony’s web2 services to its blockchain network. According to the interview, the CEO of Soneium L2 told Coindesk that the first few years of the platform’s operations will be spent on onboarding Web3 people and integrating Astar zkEVM’s assets and underlying infrastructure. Then, it will move to integrate Sony products, such as Sony Bank, Sony Music, Sony Pictures and so on.

🪙 Soneium token: Currently, the protocol’s foundation hasn’t announced any plans to release its native token or conduct an airdrop in the near future, as it has just launched the first phase of its testnet. However, since “onboarding Web3 users” also includes creating multiple incentivizing programs and airdrops, Sony blockchain might likely release its governance token after the launch on the Ethereum mainnet.

Considering the big interest in the Soneium crypto project among the crypto community, our team decided to conduct comprehensive research on the web3 startup to identify and provide you with the key pros and cons of the protocol. These include:

✅ Soneium Pros:

• Very strong PR performance;
• Above-average SEO, influencer, and growth marketing;
• Strong partner and backer: Sony Global Corporation;
• Experienced executive team with previous experience at Sony Corporation and Startale Labs;
• Strong Web3 launch partners, including Optimism, The Graph, and Circle;
• The project has successfully launched its mainnet, featuring strong engagement with the protocol and its partners.

❌ Soneium Cons:

• Lack of transparency in tokenomics;
• No clear roadmap;
• No security assessments from any security audit;
• Below-average SMM performance;
• Very weak marketing infrastructure;
• Absence of investments from other Web3 funds.