So what is causing the steady decrease in OFAC-compliant blocks? In addition to community backlash against censorship, there are now more OFAC-agnostic ways of using MEV-Boost – a piece of third-party software that pre-assembles blocks for Ethereum validators. MEV-Boost is a piece of software that allows validators – those who propose and approve “blocks” of transactions to Ethereum’s ledger – to request pre-made blocks from a network of builders. And ever since the Ethereum Merge in September, most of the blocks that make it onto the blockchain pass through this middleware component. MEV-Boost was originally built to help validators extract MEV, or Maximal Extractible Value – additional profit that block builders and validators can receive from strategically reordering or including transactions within a block. The software, which was built by Ethereum research and development firm Flashbots, was born out of the firm’s efforts to solve some issues created by MEV, including centralization and censorship. It was supposed to make it possible for any Ethereum validator, large or small, to easily bite out a piece of the MEV pie. But problems arose with MEV-Boost after OFAC sanctioned the Ethereum mixer program Tornado Cash in August. Validators that use MEV-Boost must select a third-party “relayer” tasked with delivering them pre-built blocks. Some of these relayers, out of sensitivity toward OFAC, automatically filter out blocks containing Tornado Cash transactions. These “censored” relayers included Flashbots’ own relay, the one that most users of the MEV-Boost platform tend to use by default. So in the weeks since this has all taken place, what has the community done to try to reverse Ethereum’s censorship course? Since the last time I wrote about MEV-Boost, four new relayers that are noncensoring have entered the market. Those relayers are Agnostic, Relayoor, Ultrasound and Aestus. Although they currently make up a tiny fraction of blocks relayed, there’s now greater diversity for validators to connect with (six of the 10 relays that are now available are noncensoring). Others attribute the decline in censorship to the fact that validators are more willing to connect to relays that are not Flashbots, now that they have become more comfortable with the MEV-Boost space. | 