Ethereum Foundation Researcher: FOCIL has been confirmed to be included in future major upgrades, directly encoding censorship resistance into the consensus layer.

On April 1, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, Jihoon Song, presented the progress of FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, i.e., EIP-7805) at the EthCC[9] conference. He pointed out that currently more than 80% of Ethereum blocks are produced by a small number of block builders, and that the high level of centralization brings significant censorship risk, while FOCIL aims to shift the right to include transactions from a single builder to a decentralized committee of validators.

FOCIL’s core process consists of three steps: for each slot (Slot), 16 validators are randomly selected to form a committee; members publish local inclusion lists based on their observations of the mempool; after the proposer aggregates them, validators will vote to reject blocks that do not include transactions from valid lists. This means that resistance to censorship no longer relies on moral assumptions, but is instead directly encoded into the fork-choice rules. Compared with the earlier proposal, the committee mechanism significantly reduces the risk of bribery and extortion attacks, and provides native support for account abstraction (AA) and privacy protocols. Jihoon revealed that FOCIL has been identified as a core feature of Ethereum’s subsequent major upgrades; most clients have already completed prototype implementations, and the community is optimizing proof sizes and Gas efficiency to support future “GigaGas”-level scalability.