With all this controversy around censoring validators, relays and software providers emerges a key question: What if censorship could be engineered out of existence?
In a world where “trustlessness” is a core tenet, such a utopian ideal becomes appealing.
Enter, shutterized Beacon Chain.
In a research proposal this past March, authors framed the shutterized Beacon Chain concept as a way to solve the MEV problem.
The proposal introduced a new Ethereum transaction: transactions that are encrypted when they go to the mempool.
Outside of limited information (like the “tip” that a transaction includes for validators to ensure it gets added to a block), other core details – like who is sending a transaction, who is on the receiving end and the quantity of tokens changing hands – are hidden from searchers and block builders.
Only after a transaction is approved and confirmed on-chain will its content become unencrypted.
The idea was originally proposed by Martin Köppelman, the founder of Gnosis Chain.
“The concept of a shutterized Beacon Chain, in general, is that we separate transaction inclusion from transaction execution,” he explained to CoinDesk. “So you have a period where you blindly include transactions purely … based on whether they are paying a fee, and whether they are paying a high enough fee. If they do, they should be included. That's it.”
It’s obvious why this might be useful from an anti-MEV perspective: If block builders and searchers can’t see a transaction’s payload (meaning what is being paid out to whom), then they won’t have the information that they need to extract MEV. (How can you “front-run” a transaction if you don’t even know what it contains?)
As a side effect, shutterization could play a major role in preventing censorship. Validators and relays won’t know whether to censor a transaction if they can’t see its sender or recipient.
We won’t dive too deeply into the underlying mechanics of the shutterized Beacon Chain concept in this newsletter. Beyond being complicated, the idea hasn’t yet been fully fleshed out on an engineering level (though “shutter” concepts are being built out on Ethereum rollups and other blockchains).
Read the full article here.
