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– Ethereum plans ePBS to curb centralization of gatherers.

– FOCIL introduces inclusion guarantees for multilateral transactions.

– Encrypted wait pools are targeted to combat malicious MEV.

Ethereum (ETH) is gearing up for structural changes to its block creation mechanism and control over the process. In his detailed post, Vitalik Buterin explained that the upcoming ‘Glamsterdam’ update introduces ePBS (enshrined separation of blockchain offering and blockchain building functions). The goal is to prevent the concentration of blockchain builders from leading to the centralization of validators.

In doing so, proposers will be able to transfer blockchain construction to the biller market without permission, preserving the decentralization of staking. However, as mentioned in Buterin’s March 2 post, this does not solve the problem of biller densification.

Vitalik Buterin’s post describing the update.

To counter this, Buterin introduced FOCIL, a system that integrates multilateral block building directly into the protocol. Under FOCIL, sixteen randomly selected participants identify transactions to be included in a block. If these transactions are excluded, the block is rejected.

This serves as a kind of insurance policy. Even if a single assembler dominates block production, it will not be able to block transactions completely. The power to enable becomes somewhat dispersed.

A larger concept called “Big FOCIL” could further develop this model, potentially reducing the role of billers to mostly MEV ordering and state change calculations. As Buterin explains:

We avoid duplication by forcing the i-th FOCIL participant to default to include only (i) transactions whose first hexadecimal character of the sender address matches i, and (ii) transactions that were next but did not fall into the past slot.

Thus, with a delay cost of one slot, only the censored transaction is threatened by duplication. When taken to its logical limit, the builder’s task can be reduced to incorporating only “MEV-important” operations (e.g., DEX arbitration) and calculating the state transition.

Another area of focus is toxic MEV, including anticipation and sandwich attacks.

The team views encrypted wait pools as a means of defense. If operations remain encrypted until they are enabled, miners will not be able to see and exploit them until they are completed. The technical challenge is to ensure transactions are valid and decrypted securely at the right time.

An excerpt from Buterin’s article.

Buterin also emphasized an aspect that is often overlooked: the level of transaction acceptance. Between the time a transaction is sent and the time it hits the block, users are vulnerable to covert viewing and manipulation.

Suggestions include routing through Tor, Ethereum-specific mixnet solutions, latency-optimized non-mixnet private networks like Flashnet, and similar approaches.