Has Ethereum Become More and More Centralized? The crypto community is alarmed. Indeed, censorship is starting to gain ground in this very popular blockchain. At the moment, 4/5 of the biggest “ block builders » on the network filter transactions sanctioned by the US government. Overview !
An increasingly centralized Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin was the subject of a public lynching recently while he was presenting the new Ethereum roadmap. Why attack a Web3 icon in this way? In fact, he spoke of a possible use of the UTxO (Unspent Transaction Output) approach to review ETH staking. The blockchain he co-founded lacks decentralization so much that it will be necessary to borrow more innovative and decentralized concepts from other projects.
“ More than 72% of Ethereum block creators ‘censor’ OFAC-sanctioned transactionsthe US government, according to data which highlights that ‘credibly neutral’ blockchains have become more centralized as a result of the MEV. »
In a long talk axed on ” Ethereum’s ‘censorship’ problem », CoinDesk highlighted the disappointment of some researchers and users of the second largest blockchain in the world. The reason : censorship begins to gain ground in this network.
According to the results of a study conducted by Toni Wahrstätter, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, 72% of data blocks displayed on MEV-Boost are currently subject to censorship. As a reminder, MEV-Boost is the intermediate software powering the validators writing blocks on the Ethereum network.
72%, this is really disturbing given that block builders on Ethereum only filtered 25% of transactions in November 2022.
Of the 5 largest Ethereum block builders, only “Titan Builder” disapproves of this practice. Martin Köppelmann, founder of Gnosis Chain, sounded the alarm stating that:
“ If Titan started censoring tomorrow, Ethereum would be censored at more than 90%. We are therefore only one manufacturer away from fairly strong censorship on Ethereum “.
OFAC in action
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is said to be behind all this fuss. Indeed, by tackling Tornado Cash, supporting lawsuit, this branch of the US Treasury Department has in some way put pressure on the builders of Ethereum blocks. Let’s note this very important fact: Tornado Cash is an Ethereum-based “private mixing” program that allows traceless transactions.
After OFAC decided to plug the tunnel through which cryptos stolen by North Korea’s Lazarus Group pass, funds supplying terrorist organizations like Hamas or countries sanctioned by the United States like Iran and Russia. By adding Tornado’s computer code based on Ethereum to its blacklist, the American regulator would have achieved its desired objectives.
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