Ethereum is putting an old crypto promise back at the center of the game. Not the marketing promise. The political promise. The one that says that a public network should not depend on the mood of an intermediary, a blacklist, or a “we'll see later”. Vitalik Buterin has just reignited this cypherpunk thread with a simple, almost brutal message: Ethereum “going hard”. Behind the formula, there is a very concrete technical choice: FOCIL, for Fork Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, announced as the headliner on the consensus side of the next Hegota upgrade, expected in the second half of 2026.
In brief
- Vitalik supports FOCIL an upgrade to make Ethereum more resistant to censorship at the protocol level.
- With EIP 8141 the network wants to facilitate the inclusion of smart accounts and sponsored transactions without discreet blocking.
- The community debates, some fear effects for validators, others see a clear gain in robustness.
FOCIL: when the protocol no longer accepts “filtering”
FOCIL targets a specific point, often invisible to the general public: the capacity, voluntary or constrained, to “not include” certain transactions. In ETH's recent history, we've seen validators avoid operations tied to sanctioned addresses or protocols like Tornado Cash, in the name of compliance and legal risk.
The heart of FOCIL is the crypto idea that inclusion should not be a favor. If a proposed block ignores valid transactions present in inclusion lists, the fork choice mechanism can favor another branch and “fork away” the block that did the sorting. In short: you can try to censor, but you run the risk of losing the race.
What changes the psychology of the system is the notion of a limited deadline. Buterin insists on “rapid” inclusion, often in one or two slots, even if the environment becomes adversarial. The promise here is not perfection. It's predictability.
The FOCIL + EIP 8141 pair: the upgrade that also speaks to “smart accounts”
Where the debate becomes more strategic is when Vitalik links FOCIL to EIP 8141. His argument: making smart accounts first-class citizens, rather than elegant workarounds. Multisig, key rotation, quantum-resistant signatures, gas-sponsored transactions, all of this must be able to exist without requiring implicit authorization from the block production pipeline.
FOCIL strengthens this crypto bet by multiplying the inclusion paths. Buterin talks about a model where a transaction can go through one of 17 potential players chosen randomly at each slot: the proposer or the “includers”. This is a way to break a very modern bottleneck: practical centralization around builders and MEV extraction.
The transition is quite clear: if Ethereum wants to accommodate more sophisticated uses, it must make these uses “uncensorable” by design, not by reputation. Otherwise, every innovation ends up depending on an actor who, one day, will say no.
Crypto critics: more resistance, but at what cost for validators?
FOCIL does not arrive in consensual silence. Voices like that of Ameen Soleimani warn of potential side effects, including the idea of forcing the inclusion of sensitive transactions and shifting risk to validators. The criticism is not only technical. It is also institutional: solving a censorship problem by adding a mechanism that can create other tensions is sometimes like moving dust under a larger carpet.
Supportive developers defend a simple logic: resistance to censorship is not a slogan, it is a protocol property that has to be paid for, like security. And if the builder market becomes concentrated, “trusting the market” becomes fragile, because a single bottleneck can be enough to filter transactions.
From this perspective, the rebound of Ethereum, which is running out of steam upon contact with a technical threshold, also reflects a more fundamental issue: that of a network capable of guaranteeing inclusion, even under constraint. This is precisely what FOCIL seeks to strengthen, by making blocking a valid transaction much more difficult.
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