Vitalik Buterin’s Proposal To Reduce Ethereum Censorship

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum,

 suggests "partial block auctions" to address Ethereum censorship risks. 

Vitalik Buterin aims to limit the authority of builders in order to prevent centralization and other Ethereum economic exploitation. The concerns about Ethereum censorship grew significantly with Merge's transition to the PoS mechanism.

Ethereum co-founder suggests limiting builders from producing complete blocks as developers attempt to prevent Ethereum censorship after the Merge. He argues that partial block auctions can further decentralize block production by allowing builders to select only the first half of a block rather than the entire block.

“Instead of having complete control over the entire block if they win an auction, builders would have more restricted power.”

Builders, on the other hand, will have enough power to acquire practically all of the maximal extractable value (MEV) and other benefits of proposer/builder separation (PBS). In fact, builders can be reordered, pre-positioned, and appended, and proposers can be limited.

Vitalik Buterin suggests three options for restricting block manufacturing power. The possible ways are Inclusion lists, Proposer suffixes, and pre-commit proposer suffixes.

Inclusion lists: the proposer gives a list of transactions to be included in the block unless the builder fills a block with additional transactions. However, the flaws include concerns with incentive compatibility, increased requirements on proposers, exploitation such as sandwich attacks, and incomplete enshrining for account abstraction.

Proposer suffixes: the proposer adds a suffix to the block that prevents builders from seeing the proposer's information and allows them to add transactions that builders overlooked. This avoids compatibility difficulties but has the same drawbacks as inclusion lists.

Pre-commit proposer suffixes: the proposer has already committed to a Merkle tree or KZG, as well as any additional transactions they choose to put in the block. A proposer adds the suffix after a builder develops a block. This eliminates a proposer's MEV opportunities while addressing other flaws.

Vitalik Buterin suggested restricting authority for both proposers and builders and including a third party in the block creation process to prevent centralization. As a result, it will assist to alleviate Ethereum censorship.

ETH Price After the Merge

As censorship concerns grow following the Merge, the Ethereum price remains weak. Censorship concerns have also led the market cap of Circle's USDC stablecoin to drop below $48 billion.

According to CoinGabbar statistics, the Ethereum price is currently trading at $1,288, down nearly 1.7% in the last 24 hours. Since the Merge, the price of ETH has dropped by more than 19%.

Read also: ETHEREUM PRICE ANALYSIS CMP-$1300: Will ETH Explode Because It's Sitting on High Explosives?