Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has revealed his vision to maintain blockchain neutrality by using the FOCIL Framework. The FOCIL framework was created in response to the concerns over transaction censorship.
You can read more about it here:
- Vitalik Buterin has proposed FOCIL as a way to shield Ethereum transactions from censorship
- Spreading the transaction inclusion over 17 proposers in each block slot
- Ameen Soleimani warns that FOCIL may expose US Validators to sanctions
Buterin emphasized Ethereum’s importance in a recent X-post. “dumb pipe” Layer-1 is the layer that processes transactions.
Buterin responded directly to Ameen Solimani’s criticism of potential legal risk for U.S. Validators. He told me:
“I think neutrality / ‘dumb pipe’ property of the L1 is important enough that we should have multiple lines of defense to protect it: 1. Make sure that the public mempool continues to be strong and it continues to be viable to build blocks ‘naively’, by just grabbing txs from the public mempool. 2. Work on (extra-protocol) distributed block building technology 3. Add extra channels through which txs can be included, so that EVEN IF block building gets fully taken over by centralized professional builders AND like 2 of them control 99% of the block production, they still can’t censor transactions.”
Buterin: FOCIL is one of these ‘extra channels’
Buterin suggested three defensive lines to safeguard Ethereum (ETH) neutrality. The main components of this include maintaining a public mempool with a high level, implementing distributed block building technologies, and adding more channels for the inclusion of transactions.
FOCIL, the third method is a new mechanism. This framework replaces Ethereum’s old system of selecting one proposer for each slot with 17 proposers.
A proposer is entitled to the right of first refusal “moving last” The first 16 transactions are selected by choosing the order in which they should be placed, and the remaining 16 must include all the transactions somewhere within the block.
There are 16 different kinds of umbrellas. “non-privileged” proposers carry lighter workloads — they only need to compute transaction validation and can operate statelessly. It is possible for an attester of any type to act as an auxiliary proposal.
Buterin’s solution tackles block builders oligopoly. At the moment, only a handful of professional block builders are in control of most Ethereum blocks. They could stop users accessing the Ethereum network if these professional builders coordinated to censor transaction.
FOCIL avoids this problem by spreading the inclusion rights of transactions across multiple validators. They cannot even censor transactions if 17 proposers have each been given inclusion rights.
Soleimani raises FOCIL concerns
Soleimani expressed concern that FOCIL might put U.S. Validators in legal danger. He claimed that requiring validators include transactions coming from banned addresses would expose them to criminal sanctions of up 20 years.
Validators in the United States can filter transactions sanctioned by their government while they participate. In the peak of Tornado Cash censorship only 90% nodes were able to filter these transactions. It means that they take roughly 10 times as long to process.
Soleimani warned that FOCIL may make it impossible to allow US validators the opportunity to participate, without infringing on sanctions. It could result in the prosecution of core developers, validators and attesters.
Buterin argues that Ethereum’s neutrality explains these design decisions. He thinks that all transactions should be processed by the blockchain, no matter where they originate or go.
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Source: crypto.news
