Long before the Ethereum network’s transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), censorship concerns have been a bone of contention. To mitigate these risks, Vitalik Buterin has proposed “partial block auctions.”
In the latest blog post, the Ethereum co-founder suggested that builders should have a more limited amount of power to prevent ETH censorship post Merge. Instead of letting them have full rein to construct the entire block if they win an auction, builders would have a more limited amount of power.
According to Buterin, builders will retain enough power to be able to capture almost all maximal extractable value (MEV), as well as other benefits of proposer/builder separation (PBS). But, the co-founder underscored that it should be weakened to “limit opportunities for abuse.”
As such, three potential ways of limiting block production power were presented, which entails: inclusion lists, proposer suffixes, and pre-commit proposer suffixes.
According to Buterin, both the proposer as well as the builder’s role should be ideally minimal. However, this leaves many other important tasks unallocated, meaning the introduction of a “third actor” in the block production pipeline is inevitable.
Despite the debate surrounding centralization in the wider community, Ethereum’s core developers are not worried. In a pre-Merge developer call in August, the issue was scrutinized at length, and a majority reportedly agreed on the improvement of the current MEV designs to enhance PBS.
After the completion of the Merge, mining data highlighted Ethereum’s significant reliance on Flashbots, which happens to be a single server for building blocks. This was enough to spark centralization concerns over a single point of failure for the ecosystem. Data suggest that 83.5% of all relay blocks have been found to be built by Flashbots alone.