March 28, 2024

Vitalik Buterin Proposed a Solution to Protect Ethereum from Validator Censorship

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Vitalik Buterin proposed a solution to protect Ethereum from validator censorship

The co-founder of Ethereum added a stage to the project's technical roadmap that increases censorship resistance and decentralization of the blockchain.

The updated roadmap now includesstage called Scourge, which will be followed by the previously announced Verge, Purge and Splurge updates. In the roadmap explanation, Vitalik Buterin promises that Scourge will “ensure reliable, trustworthy and neutral transaction enablement and avoidance of centralization and other protocol risks associated with MEV.”

After the update is launched, validators will not be able toinclude blocks in the network, guided only by their own interests. The announced update is intended to combat miner extractable value (MEV), an effect that occurs when a validator is ahead of other network participants in deciding which transactions should be placed in a block and in what order. The effect allows the validator to duplicate all profitable transactions from the mempool and execute them before other participants in the ether market. 

So far, complete information about Scourge has not been disclosed, with the exception of a screenshot from the Twitter of the project co-founder. 

Previously, Buterin proposed a different solutionproblems - "Partial Block Auction", in which the block creator is given the right to determine only part of the content. Other consensus-based anti-censorship proposals have been put forward, such as Flashbots—Unified Unifying Auctions for the Expression of Value (SUAVE).

Labrys recently offered a toolwhich will allow tracking of MEV bots enforcing US sanctions on Ethereum. According to Labrys, about 45% of blocks on the Ethereum network are rejected by such bots. Immediately after the merger, blockchain researchers warned that Flashbots' mining extraction value (MEV) protocol was censoring all transactions (23%) on Ethereum originating from the blocked Tornado Cash mixer.