Reversing Censorship on Ethereum | Blockchain News
Since October 11, the percentage of Ethereum blocks that comply with orders from the United States Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) has fallen to its current level of 47%, which is the lowest level since that date.
The latest achievement in the fight against censorship comes roughly two and a half months and one day after the share of OFAC-compliant blockchains hit an all-time high of 79% on November 21st.
OFAC-compliant blocks are blocks that do not include any transactions involving parties that have been blacklisted by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Treasury Department.
Those individuals opposed to censorship within the Ethereum ecosystem may see a decrease in the number of compatible blocks as a victory.
According to a statement released by blockchain consultancy Labrys, the originator of MEV Watch, the decline may be related to more validators choosing to use MEV boost relays that do not filter transactions in accordance with OFAC standards.
The majority of the shift in market share has been taken up by the BloXroute Max Profit relay, the Ultrasound Money relay and especially the Agnostic Boost relay.
MEV boost relays play the role of trusted intermediaries between block producers and block builders, paving the way for Ethereum validators to delegate the construction of their blocks to third-party block builders.
Labrys CEO Lachlan Feeney issued a statement on February 14 expressing his satisfaction with the way the Ethereum community has responded to the censorship issue ever since it first surfaced during the Merge event.
He pointed out that the recent drop in censorship-compliant blocks was particularly notable since it was achieved without the involvement of a user-activated soft fork (UASF). He made the observation that “many individuals” in the Ethereum community had requested the soft fork before the merge to resist censorship.
“I’m incredibly proud of the Ethereum community for the progress we’ve made on this issue,” Feeney said, adding: “When we released the MevWatch tool that brought attention to a bug in Ethereum, the community didn’t bury its head in the sand. but instead rose to the occasion and made significant progress in addressing the issue.” “When we released the MevWatch tool to draw attention to a flaw in Ethereum, the community did not bury its head in the sand, but rose to the occasion and made significant progress
However, as Feeney stressed, “there is still a lot more work to be done.”
On August 8, OFAC sanctioned wallet addresses that conduct transactions using the Ethereum-based privacy mixing technology Tornado Cash. These wallet addresses are linked to Ether (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC).
On September 16, during the first 24 hours of Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, only 9% of blocks were filtered by OFAC.
Nevertheless, this figure increased dramatically over the following two months, reaching its highest point of 79% on November 21st.
Thereafter, the percentage of OFAC-compliant blocks remained between 68 and 75% until January 29, when it dropped to 66%. Since then, despite a few brief increases, it has been steadily declining.
