Chainfeeds Summary:
Decentralization is never the default state, but rather a result that needs to be achieved and maintained through protocol design.
Article source:
https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/95416
Article Author:
imToken Labs
Opinion:
imToken Labs: Vitalik's approach this time is unusually frank. He didn't continue with the grand narrative of "changing the world," but instead acknowledged that Ethereum's development to date has had a rather limited impact on improving the real lives of ordinary people. While the efficiency of on-chain finance may have improved, and the application ecosystem is richer than in its early days, many achievements remain confined to the internal circulation of the crypto industry and haven't truly penetrated into broader social structures. Based on this reflection, he proposed a new way of understanding Ethereum: rather than viewing it merely as a financial network, it should be seen as part of a larger ecosystem of "shelter tech." In his definition, such technologies often share some common characteristics: first, they are usually open-source and free, freely usable and replicable by anyone; second, they help people communicate, collaborate, and better manage risk and wealth; and most importantly, these technologies can continue to function even in the face of government pressure, corporate blockades, or other external interventions, and won't suddenly fail due to the will of a centralized entity. To illustrate this, Vitalik even gave a vivid analogy: a true decentralized protocol is more like a hammer than a subscription service. Once you buy a Hammer blockchain, it belongs to you. It won't lose its functionality due to the manufacturer's bankruptcy, nor will it suddenly display a message saying "This feature is unavailable in your region." This idea easily brings to mind a testing standard Vitalik has mentioned many times in the past—the Walkaway Test. This test poses a seemingly simple yet extremely rigorous question: If all of Ethereum's core developers suddenly disappeared one day, could the system still function normally? This isn't just a slogan, but an extremely strict measure of decentralization. It's not really concerned with whether a decentralized narrative exists now, but whether the system can still stand firm in the worst-case future scenario. When this question is applied to the block production level, the answer becomes very specific. For a chain to pass the Walkaway Test, the power to include transactions in blocks cannot be concentrated in the hands of a few people for a long time, nor can the public transaction flow be naturally exposed to the risks of preemption, suppression, or censorship. It is against this backdrop that FOCIL and crypto mempools have gradually entered the core discussions of Ethereum. In recent years, Ethereum's block building process has become increasingly professionalized. To improve efficiency and MEV extraction capabilities, the role of the builder has been continuously strengthened, and block production has gradually deviated from the ideal state of "each validator independently building blocks." This model has indeed brought real benefits, but it has also brought significant costs: once block building power is concentrated in the hands of a few large participants, censorship is no longer just a theoretical risk. Theoretically, any mainstream builder can selectively reject certain transactions, such as transfer requests from sanctioned addresses. This means that the issue is no longer just about transaction fees or throughput, but whether the public transaction infrastructure is still trustworthy for ordinary users. FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists) is a direct response from the Ethereum protocol layer to the censorship problem. Its core idea is not complicated: by introducing the Inclusion List mechanism, whether a transaction can be included in a block is no longer entirely determined unilaterally by the proposer or builder. Under this mechanism, each slot selects an Inclusion List Committee from the validator set. Committee members, based on their observations of the mempool, form a list of transactions to be included and broadcast it. The proposer of the next slot must meet the constraints of these lists when building blocks, and the attester will only vote for blocks that meet the conditions. In other words, FOCIL does not eliminate the role of the builder, but rather provides stronger inclusion guarantees for valid transactions in the public mempool through fork selection rules. Builders can still optimize transaction ordering and improve efficiency and returns around MEV, but they no longer have the final power to decide whether a legitimate transaction is included in a block. Although this mechanism has sparked considerable controversy in the community, it has been confirmed as a core proposal for the consensus layer of the next major upgrade, Hegotá, and is expected to go live in the second half of 2026 after the Glamsterdam upgrade. However, FOCIL does not solve another key problem: whether a transaction has been fully seen by the entire market before it actually enters a block, thus giving MEV seekers the opportunity to preempt or sandwich it. For DeFi users, this means that even if a transaction is not censored, it may still be targeted for exploitation before entering a block. This is the root cause of the long-standing sandwich attack, and it has also driven the emergence of solutions such as crypto mempools.
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