Ethereum Prioritizes Censorship Resistance
Ethereum is advancing a major upgrade focused on censorship resistance, which has been endorsed by Vitalik Buterin as a core part of a five-year "cypherpunk" roadmap. The plan aims to reinforce Ethereum's role as a neutral settlement layer by guaranteeing all valid transactions are eventually included, a move seen as a response to pressure from high-performance rivals. The technical roadmap also includes integrating ZK-proofs into Layer 1 and upgrading the EVM to a RISC-V architecture to enhance scalability and decentralization.
- A key mechanism for achieving censorship resistance is through "inclusion lists," which allow block proposers to designate a set of transactions that must be included in subsequent blocks for them to be considered valid. The upcoming Hegota hard fork is slated to introduce Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL), a specific implementation of this concept. - This censorship resistance is part of a broader strategy to separate the roles of block "proposers" from block "builders" (Proposer-Builder Separation or PBS). This division of labor is designed to prevent centralization and make it more difficult for any single entity to censor transactions. - The proposed upgrade to a RISC-V architecture for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is expected to significantly improve performance, with some experts predicting a potential 100-fold increase in transaction throughput. This change aims to make smart contract execution faster and reduce transaction fees. - The integration of ZK-proofs directly into Layer 1 is a pivotal part of the roadmap, which would allow validators to verify blocks by checking a cryptographic proof rather than re-executing every transaction. This is anticipated to lower hardware requirements for validators and increase network scalability. - The Ethereum Foundation has set specific technical benchmarks for the real-time proving of ZK-proofs on Layer 1, including a latency of less than 10 seconds for 99% of blocks and a proof size under 300 KiB. The hardware for running these proofs should not exceed $100,000 in cost. - This five-year plan also includes a focus on post-quantum security to ensure the long-term resilience of the network against future cryptographic threats. - The roadmap is divided into three main tracks: scaling, user experience improvements, and base layer hardening, with FOCIL being a central component of the hardening track. The "Glamsterdam" upgrade, preceding Hegota, will focus on capacity improvements like parallel execution. - This technical evolution is seen as a direct response to the growing threat of censorship at the validator level, a vulnerability that became more apparent after US Treasury sanctions on Tornado Cash led to over half of Ethereum blocks being produced by OFAC-compliant validators who were actively excluding certain transactions.
