Writing Censorship Resistance into the Protocol: Who Decides If an Ethereum Transaction Can Be On-Chained?
Building censorship resistance into the protocol: who decides if an Ethereum transaction gets into a block?
In Ethereum, censorship resistance is a technical capability, not a political stance. A key challenge emerges from the current Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) model, where specialized Builders construct most blocks. This centralizes the power to include transactions, creating risks, as Builders can exclude certain transactions under external pressure.
The core problem is ensuring any transaction following protocol rules gets a fair chance to enter a block. To address Builder dominance, Ethereum researchers are exploring Inclusion Lists—mechanisms allowing validators to specify transactions that must be included if valid and space permits.
Two primary proposals are detailed:
1. **FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists)**: Distributes the power to create an inclusion list from a single Proposer to a randomly selected committee of validators. If a Builder ignores the committee's aggregated list, the network's consensus rules will reject the block, making censorship costly.
2. **FairFIL (Fair Forward Inclusion Lists)**: Focuses on accountability and economic disincentives. Builders must publicly list valid transactions they exclude, creating a verifiable record. Persistently censoring transactions by omitting them from this list can lead to escalating penalties, including loss of block rewards.
For users, these mechanisms aim to improve transaction inclusion certainty without changing how they interact with wallets. Valid, fee-paying transactions should no longer be indefinitely delayed by a Builder's choice. While Builders retain control over transaction ordering for MEV extraction, their gatekeeping power over *who gets in* is constrained.
Current status: FOCIL is advancing in Ethereum's development pipeline, while FairFIL is an earlier-stage research proposal.
Ultimately, Ethereum's approach acknowledges that not all participants will remain neutral. The goal is to make censorship observable, expensive, and unsustainable through protocol-level rules, moving the network's credible neutrality from a social promise to a technically enforced property.
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