$ETH Ethereum's co-founder isn't staying quiet about one of the network's most persistent structural weaknesses. In a detailed technical post published Monday, Vitalik Buterin laid out a series of mechanisms designed to address centralization creeping into Ethereum's block construction layer.
Block building, the process of organizing transactions before they're confirmed on-chain, has quietly become a pressure point for decentralization. As sophisticated players dominate the space, smaller validators get squeezed out and censorship risks grow. Buterin's post tackles this head-on.
Central to his proposals is FOCIL, a mechanism that assigns randomly selected validators the responsibility of enforcing which transactions must be included in each block. Any block missing those mandated transactions gets automatically rejected. The elegance here is simple: even a monopolistic builder can't selectively censor transactions without the entire block getting thrown out.
Buterin goes further with "Big FOCIL," a scaled-up version that hands validators near-total control over block content, pushing builders into a narrow lane focused only on MEV-related computations. Essentially commoditizing block construction.
On the MEV front, Buterin also addresses toxic practices like frontrunning and sandwich attacks. His fix: encrypt the mempool until transactions are confirmed, eliminating the visibility window that bad actors currently exploit.
Network-layer exposure gets attention too. He points to tools like Tor and Ethereum-specific options like Flashnet as protections against transaction interception before blocks are built. The Ethereum Foundation's Kohaku privacy initiative also gets a mention.
These proposals arrive ahead of Glamsterdam, Ethereum's upcoming upgrade introducing ePBS to separate proposers from builders, though Buterin warns that alone won't solve the problem.
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