Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is turning his spotlight to a low-profile but critical layer of the network: the actors who assemble transactions into blocks. In a Monday blog post, he outlined a set of concrete ideas to prevent block building from becoming a centralized chokepoint as Ethereum scales.
Why it matters
As Ethereum evolves, validator roles are being separated from block construction (a change formalized by the upcoming “Glamsterdam” upgrade’s proposer-builder separation). That creates a competitive market for professional block builders — but competition alone won’t guarantee decentralization. If a few builders capture most of the market, they could censor transactions or extract outsized fees from users.
Key proposals Buterin highlighted
- FOCIL (an anti-censorship backstop): Randomly selected participants would each nominate a few transactions that must appear in the next block. If those transactions are absent, the block would be rejected. The mechanism is designed to make it much harder for a dominant builder to permanently exclude specific users.
- Transaction encryption: To combat “toxic MEV” (traders preying on visible pending transactions to front-run or “sandwich” trades), transactions could be encrypted until they’re finalized, denying opportunistic actors early visibility.
- Anonymized routing: Because transactions can be spotted by intermediaries before they reach builders, anonymized networking could help prevent surveillance and selective propagation of transactions.
- More distributed block building: Buterin also sketched a longer-term vision where not every transaction needs tight global ordering. Relaxing the requirement that all activity be processed in a single, strictly ordered block could reduce centralized pressure points.
The problem of “toxic MEV”
Buterin singled out MEV-driven behaviors — like front-running and sandwich attacks — as a major source of user harm. These strategies depend on seeing pending transactions in mempools or via privileged access. Encryption and routing changes aim to remove that visibility, while FOCIL and distribution-oriented designs address censorship and market dominance.
Big picture
Buterin’s thread suggests Ethereum’s decentralization challenges are shifting away from who validates blocks and toward the infrastructure that decides which transactions make it onchain. His proposals combine short-term safeguards with longer-term architectural shifts, signaling that multiple layers — economic, cryptographic, and networking — will need to evolve together to keep block building competitive and censorship-resistant.
For users and builders alike, the changes Buterin proposes could reshape how transactions are created, routed, and included — and determine who ultimately controls access to Ethereum’s block space.
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