Just a month ago, Ethereum validators were still censoring about 50% of blocks that made it onto the blockchain. The last time that Ethereum had such low levels of censorship was September 24, 2022.
What contributed to the reversal?
Since Ethereum went through the Merge in September, about 85% of the blocks that made it onto the blockchain participated in a middleware known as MEV-Boost, where validators can request pre-made blocks from builders.
MEV-Boost is a software that helps validators earn MEV, or maximal extractible value, which are profits that come from rearranging or including certain transactions within a block. The MEV-Boost software was innovated by Ethereum research and development team Flashbots in order to distribute MEV among validators more equally.
While MEV-Boost hasn’t been integrated into Ethereum at the protocol level, it’s widely used by the Ethereum ecosystem, as 85% of validators have relayed blocks via the middleware component. Flashbots also has its own relayer for validators to connect with, used by roughly 25% of validators.
After OFAC sanctioned Tornado Cash, there was debate over whether validators should include those transactions or not. Ever since then, the Ethereum community has continued to push for a censorship reversal, and the results of those efforts now appear to be paying off thanks, in large part, to the introduction of new, non-censoring relays.
At the time the sanctions went into effect, most validators were connected to Flashbots’ MEV-Boost relay which Flashbots immediately programmed to censor transactions by default.
In response to community backlash, however, Flashbots raced to complete the process of open-sourcing its code for MEV-Boost, so others could develop their own non-censoring relays.
In November, Agnostic and ultra sound relays with a non-censoring version of MEV-Boost were introduced. Since then, they have risen up in the ranks of relays delivering blocks on Ethereum. Flashbots accounts for delivering about 26% of the blocks over the past 14 days, while Agnostic and ultra sound each have delivered roughly 20% of the blocks over the past 14 days.