Sony’s Soneium: Crypto market impact post testnet launch

• Soneium Testnet’s number of transactions exceeded 3 million.
• In the meantime, top L2s like ARB and OP turned bullish. 

Popular Japanese technology company Sony has now entered the blockchain space with its latest Ethereum [ETH] L2, Soneium.

The latest launch created buzz in the community, making Soneium one of the most talked-about topics in the space. 

Sonerium in the limelight 

Sony announced the launch of its ETH L2 on the 23rd of August. As per the official statement, Soneium is the infrastructure network that forms the basis of Web3.

The goal of this new blockchain platform is to popularize blockchain technology and accelerate Web3 innovation.

The official announcement mentioned,

“In the future, we will explore and develop a plan to make the network available to the public and aim to create new services by leveraging the various businesses and IP within the Sony Group so that Soneium becomes an infrastructure that everyone can use on a daily basis.”

Applications that work with Soneium’s network will let end users access the platform and engage with services relating to entertainment, Web3 gaming, and NFT marketplaces offered by individual apps.

Soon after the launch, the L2 gained much popularity. This was evident from the rise in mentions as indicated by Google Trends data on the worldwide level last week. 

Source: Google Trends

AMBCrypto then checked Sonium’s testnet stats to see how it’s performing. As per our analysis, the Soneium/Minato testnet had processed a total of over 1.3 million blocks.

The testnet exceeded 3.3 million transactions and had over 200k wallets. At press time, its daily transactions stood at 123k, as per Explorer testnet.soneium. 

Source: Explorer.testnet.soneium

How are other L2s doing?

Since Soneium was one of the latest additions to the thriving Ethereum L2 ecosystem, AMBCrypto planned to check how the top ETH L2s like Arbitrum [ARB] and Optimism [OP] were doing.

To check that, we assessed Artemis’ data.

As per our analysis, ARB continued to dominate OP in terms of both daily active addresses and daily transactions last month.

However, despite having a major lead in network activity, ARB and OP’s fees and revenue graphs were closely knit.

Source: Artemis

Realistic or not, here’s ARB’s market cap in BTC’s terms 

But OP did manage to outshine ARB on the price front last week. On one hand, OP registered a 7% weekly price hike, and on the other hand, ARB’s price only went up by 2%.

At the time of writing, OP was trading at $1.47 with a market capitalization of over $1.7 billion. Arbitrum was valued at $0.518 with a market cap of over $1.8 billion.