Top Crypto News Today: Vitalik Buterin proposed Partial Block Auctions to reduce the Risk of Ethereum Censorship

The Ethereum platform recently underwent a historical upgrade that transitioned the running chain from a Proof-of-Work to a Proof-of-Stake mechanism. The Beacon chain, which went live way back in December 2020, was merged with the mainnet. This was done to lower power usage and make the process more environmentally friendly overall. 

However, soon after the merge, concerns over the platform being more centralized made huge rounds within the space. This was mainly due to the fact that a couple of addresses held more than 70% of the staked ETH, which held more power than was required during the validation process. Hence, to reduce the risk of Ethereum censorship, the co-founder Vitalik Buterin, proposed “partial block auctions.” 

The partial block auctions prevent the builders from producing an entire block, which may further prevent the Ethereum chain from becoming more centralized. The proposed “decentralized” block production may allow the builders only to choose the first half of the block, instead of having the full power to construct the entire block, if they win an auction. 

However, the builders may still have the power to capture almost all MEV(Maximal Extractable Value) and the benefits of proposer/builder separation(PBS). 

Additional Read: Ethereum Price Prediction

How Partial Block Auctions Can Maintain Ethereum’s Decentralization

The proposed partial blocks, as mentioned, enable the builder to choose only the first half of the block while the builder can still hold the right to reorder, prepend, append & even constrain the proposer. It can be done in 3 possible ways, 

• Inclusion lists

Here, the proposer provides an inclusion list, which is a list of transactions that need to be included in the block unless the builder fills in the block with other transactions. However, it also carries some of its weaknesses like incentive compatibility issues, additional burden on the proposers, abuses like sandwich attacks & lastly, partial enshrining for account abstraction.  

• Proposer suffixes

A suffix for the blocks is created that prevents the builders from perceiving the information & the transactions missed by the builders. This may further reduce the incentive compatibility issue where-in the proposer may have to be required to hold the entire state, placing an extra burden on himself.

• Pre-commit Proposer Suffixes

The proposer commits the blocks to be included in advance to the Merkle tree or KZG. Further, the builder creates a block while the proposer adds the suffixes, removing his MEV opportunities as he may not be involved in block publishing. The builder adds his own blocks but leaves the other issues untouched. 

Vitalik’s proposal mainly intends to keep the proposer’s & the builder’s roles minimal and to include their own transactions to collect MEV without discriminating against the blocks. But still, the question remains the same, whether Ethereum (ETH) price will gain strength if these proposals are implemented.

As the Ethereum Merge has not impacted the ETH price largely, these proposals are believed to dissolve the censorship risk on the platform, which in turn may impact the price.