Web3 Watch: Sony lends its name to Ethereum L2

The consumer electronics giant Sony introduced its own Ethereum L2, dubbed Soneium, on Friday. Testnet deployment is set to go live in the coming weeks.

The announcement was well received amid the crypto market’s increasing lamentation of infrastructural bloat and lack of consumer applications. 

The details around actual onchain use-cases are still vague, but Sony’s focus seems to be centered around creators. The official Soneium blog emphasized “protection of rights to creativity created by creators”, and “new mechanisms for returning profits to support creators and fans.”

Sony intends to build Soneium with Optimism’s rollup development kit “OP Stack”, which already boasts 29 L2 chains in its Superchain ecosystem, based on L2Beat.

The company will launch the L2 chain under Sony Block Solutions Labs. This is a joint venture between Sony Group Corporation and Startale, a Singapore-based blockchain infrastructure startup that raised $3.5 million in June 2023.

Startale helped develop the Astar Network zkEVM chain, which is planned to transition to Soneium.

CREATOR Chain to join Zksync

As Optimism expands its burgeoning ecosystem of Superchains, ZKsync isn’t asleep at the wheel either. Stepping into the ZKsync Elastic Chain ecosystem this week is CREATOR chain, a project originally incubated by ZTX (ZepetoX).

ZTX is the metaverse initiative of ZEPETO, an Asia-based avatar social game with 20 million monthly active users.

It’s another bold attempt at leveraging a successful Web2 distribution funnel of users into Web3.

“CREATOR will offer personalized DeFi services for creators and position itself as the premier Web 2.5 hub and a one-stop shop for new entrants to crypto,” the official press release said.

ZTX’s open beta has been live on Arbitrum since December 2023. It is migrating to take advantage of Zksync’s zero-knowledge technology stack. Marco Cora, Director at the ZKsync Foundation, said: “With ZKsync, ZTX can keep up with their explosive scaling needs while also avoiding the fee spikes commonly seen in other stacks during demand surges.”

One interesting stat:

Blast L2 transactions are hitting all-time highs in the last week, racing up to almost 2.5 million in transaction count. It’s currently the second most used L2 behind Base, based on Growthepie data.

Also of note:

• Crypto exchange Gate.io is sponsoring Italian soccer, specifically FC Internazionale Milano (or Inter Milan). Its logo will appear on players’ sleeves.
• NFT marketplace Magic Eden announces its ME token, and plans to expand beyond NFT trading to fungible token trading
• The rollup-as-a-service provider Conduit unveiled its Conduit Marketplace, a new service to allow rollups to shop for the modular bits and pieces of its rollup stack in one landing page.

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the On the Margin newsletter.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.