Ethereum News

51% of Ethereum blocks are now compliant with OFAC standards, raising censorship concerns

51% of Ethereum blocks are now compliant with OFAC standards, raising censorship concerns


One month after the Merge, 51% of ethereum blocks were compliant with OFAC standards, according to blockchain development Labrys’ data, as MEV-boost relays takes over market share

On Twitter, users highlighted how the figures represent a milestone towards censorship, as more blocks are under surveillance:

OFAC stands for Office of Foreign Assets Control, the entity in charge of enforcing the United States economic sanctions, while mev-boost relays are centralized entities that act as trusted mediators between block producers and block builders. In this way, all Ethereum Proof-of-Stake (PoS) validators can outsource their block production to other builders. 

This metric tracks how many blocks were built by OFAC compliant mev-boost relays since the Merge. Due to Ethereum’s upgrade to a PoS consensus, mev-boost has been enabled to a more representative distribution of block proposers, rather than a small group of miners under Proof of Work (PoW).

Speaking to Cointelegraph in September, Lachan Feeney, Labrys’ CEO, noted that in the case of hard censorship, that would mean that “no matter how long you waited, no matter how much you paid, you would never get to a point where those sanctioned transactions would get included in the blockchain.”

Under a hard censorship scenario, “nodes would be forced by regulation to basically discard any blocks with any of these transactions in them.”

He also noted that even with soft censorship, when sanctioned transactions would…

Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Cointelegraph.com News…