Ethereum Block Generation Turning Towards OFAC Compliance

• The vast majority of blocks over the last day have been sent by relays.
• The Ethereum-based research and development team Flashbots created MEV-Boost.

On Friday, 51% of the blocks generated on the Ethereum blockchain in the past 24 hours complied with the recommendations of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Treasury Department.

In light of OFAC’s restriction on Americans utilizing the mixing protocol. The vast majority of blocks over the last day have been sent by relays that have filtered out transactions related to Tornado Cash. A service that mixes transactions to make them anonymous.

Block creators and validators may maximize their rewards. By rearranging transactions inside a block, a process known as maximal extractable value (MEV).

MEV-optimized Blocks

To mitigate the risks associated with MEV extraction. The Ethereum-based research and development team Flashbots created MEV-Boost, a piece of software that facilitates the request of blocks from a network of builders via an intermediary known as a relay.

Any participant in the network may construct a relay to transmit MEV-optimized blocks. From builders to validators, who will then propose them to the network at large.

By far the most used relay is the one that Flashbots created and maintains. Herein lies the problem, since the Flashbots relay is one of the few that will not forward blocks containing transactions from blacklisted addresses.

More so, just two of the five MEV-Boost relay providers, Manifold and bloXroute, provide censorship-free channels. Moreover, 57% of all Ethereum blocks verified were processed via MEV-Boost. Nearly eighty-one percent of the blocks were processed via Flashbots’ relay, which means that no Tornado Cash transactions were included.

Currently, sanctioned transactions may still make it into the Ethereum blockchain, but as more validators (and relays) choose to remove them from the blocks they process, this will become more unlikely.

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