Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined ideas to prevent the centralization of block building in a new blog post. He focuses on risks like transaction censorship and toxic MEV extraction. The proposals aim to maintain decentralization as Ethereum scales.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, addressed a critical aspect of the network in a blog post published on Monday. He targeted block building, the process of assembling transactions before they are finalized on the chain, which he sees as increasingly prone to centralization.
Ethereum's forthcoming Glamsterdam upgrade will introduce proposer-builder separation, enabling validators to delegate block construction to a market of builders. However, Buterin warns that dominance by a few builders could still allow transaction censorship or excessive profit extraction from users.
One key proposal is FOCIL, which involves randomly selected participants designating transactions that must appear in the next block. If omitted, the block would be invalid, serving as a safeguard against exclusion by even a monopolistic builder.
Buterin also highlighted toxic MEV, where traders use visibility into pending transactions to front-run or sandwich user trades. To counter this, he suggested encrypting transactions until finalization, limiting preemptive exploitation.
At the networking level, intermediaries can observe transactions en route to blocks, so Buterin advocated for anonymized routing to enhance privacy.
Looking ahead, he envisioned more distributed block building, arguing that not all Ethereum activity requires strict global ordering. This could alleviate central bottlenecks as the network grows, shifting decentralization challenges from validators to core infrastructure.