Buterin Unveils Multi-Stage Plan to Combat Ethereum Block Builder Centralization
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined a multi-stage plan to combat block builder centralization and MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) in an extended post.
The plan comes after the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, which will introduce enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) directly into Ethereum's consensus layer.
ePBS separates the roles of block proposers and block builders, but Buterin argued it doesn't resolve the risk that a small number of builders could still dominate and censor transactions.
The first step is FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists), which will allow 16 randomly selected attesters to nominate transactions for inclusion in the next block. Any block that ignores these nominations gets rejected by the network.
Buterin also proposed a more speculative extension, 'Big FOCIL', where the inclusion lists grow large enough to cover all transactions, potentially reducing a builder's role to ordering only MEV-relevant transactions like DEX arbitrage.
Critics have raised concerns that FOCIL could create legal exposure for node operators and increase protocol complexity.