Vitalik Buterin Proposed a Solution to Protect Ethereum from Validator Censorship

The Ethereum co-founder added a step to the project’s technical roadmap to increase censorship resistance and blockchain decentralization.

The updated roadmap now includes a milestone called Scourge, followed by the previously announced Verge, Purge, and Splurge updates. In an explanatory note to the roadmap, Vitalik Buterin promises that Scourge “will provide robust, trustworthy, and neutral transaction enablement and move away from centralization and other protocol risks associated with MEV.”

Updated roadmap diagram! pic.twitter.com/MT9BKgYcJH

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 4, 2022

After the update is launched, validators will not be able to include blocks in the network, guided only by their own interests. The announced update is designed to combat miner extractable value (MEV), the effect that occurs when a validator is ahead of other network participants in deciding which transactions should be placed in a block and in what order. The effect allows the validator to duplicate all profitable transactions from the mempool and execute them before other Ethereum market participants.

So far, full information about Scourge has not been disclosed, with the exception of a screenshot from the Twitter co-founder of the project.

Previously, Buterin proposed another solution to the problem – “Partial Block Auction”, in which the creator of the block is given the right to determine only part of the content. Other proposals to combat censorship at the consensus level have also been put forward, such as Flashbots – Single Unifying Auctions for the Expression of Value (SUAVE).

Labrys recently offered a tool that will track MEV bots that enforce US sanctions on Ethereum. According to Labrys, about 45% of blocks in the Ethereum network are rejected by such bots. Immediately after the merger, blockchain researchers warned that the Flashbots Mining Value Extraction (MEV) protocol was censoring all transactions (23%) in Ethereum originating from the locked Tornado Cash mixer.