Ethereum Foundation Researcher: FOCIL to be Incorporated in Major Future Upgrades, Directly Encoding Anti-Censorship into the Consensus Layer

On April 1, Ethereum Foundation researcher Jihoon Song presented the progress of FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, or EIP-7805) at the EthCC conference. He pointed out that currently over 80% of Ethereum blocks are produced by a small number of builders, leading to significant censorship risks due to high centralization. FOCIL aims to transfer the right to include transactions from a single builder to a decentralized committee of validators. The core process of FOCIL consists of three steps: for each slot, 16 validators are randomly selected to form a committee, members publish local inclusion lists based on their observations of the memory pool, and the proposer aggregates these lists. Validators will refuse to vote for blocks that do not include transactions from the valid lists. This means that anti-censorship is no longer reliant on moral agreements but is directly encoded in the fork rules. Compared to previous solutions, the committee mechanism significantly reduces the risks of bribery and extortion attacks, and provides native support for account abstraction (AA) and privacy protocols. Jihoon revealed that FOCIL has been confirmed as a core feature of Ethereum’s upcoming major upgrades, with most clients having completed prototype implementations. The community is currently optimizing proof sizes and gas efficiency to support future ‘GigaGas’ level scalability.