After the U.S. government blacklisted Tornado Cash transactions in August, validators on the ethereum blockchain responded quickly by excluding those sanctioned transactions. For many in the crypto industry, such moves have been criticized as censorship — directly at odds with the vision of a decentralized web free from government interference.
However, the trend is now moving in the opposite direction, with more blocks using Tornado Cash passing even without complying with US Treasury sanctions.
by page network Monitoring MEV, only 49% of the blocks that appeared on Ethereum in the last 24 hours were OFAC compliant, meaning transaction exclusion blocks are sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
The level of censorship on Ethereum is significantly lower than before. Ethereum scrutiny hit an all-time high on Nov. 21, when 79% of forwarded blocks excluded OFAC-approved transactions. The last time an Ethereum block was censored below 50% was on October 16.
In other words, more than half of the blocks produced on Ethereum in the past 24 hours were not OFAC compliant.
So what reversed Ethereum’s censorship process?
Merged OFAC Compliant Blocks | Source: mevwatch.info
MEV-Boost fuels Ethereum’s censorship issues
Since Ethereum changed its consensus mechanism to PoS (called The Merge) in September, most blocks put into the blockchain go through a middleware called MEV-Boost, which allows verification The latter requires a prefab block from the constructor.
MEV-Boost was created to help validators earn MEV (Maximum Extractable Value), which is the profit earned from including or reordering transactions in blocks.
Built by Flashbots (Ethereum R&D team), the software aims to democratize MEV among validators and solve centralization issues.
Flashbots have successfully used MEV-Boost across the ecosystem, as today 96% of validators forward blocks through this middleware. The company also runs its own relay, which is used by 68% of validators.
But after OFAC blacklisted Tornado Cash transactions by U.S. residents in August, MEV-Boost has a new set of problems, primarily censorship.
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Due to the penalty, transponders using MEV-Boost only deliver pre-made blocks to connected validators, excluding Tornado Cash transactions. In other words, MEV-Boost censors blocks by default.
Reverse review?
Pushing validators to connect to non-Flashbots forwarders is the main reason for the Ethereum censorship reversal.
Currently, 68% of blocks are forwarded by Flashbots. As recently as December, that figure was 74%. Before Flashbots started censoring Tornado Cash transactions after The Merge, they open-sourced the code so others could develop their own uncensored transponders.
There are 7 uncensored conversions available, including BloXroute’s two (Maximum Profit and Ethical) conversions, Ultrasound, Agnostic Gnosis, Manifold, Relayoor and Aestus.
Freight forwarding and total market share | Source: mevboost.pics
Martin Köppelmann, an anti-censorship advocate and co-founder of Gnosis Chain, also operates an uncensored relay channel.elder brother share In a tweet, the decline in censorship was partly due to BloXroute, Ultrasound, and Gnosis, as they make up the bulk of the uncensored block space.
Köppelmann believes, “This is good news, and I’m glad Gnosis contributed, but I also believe that Ethereum’s censorship resistance should not depend on too few entities.”
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