Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has offered fresh insights into upcoming improvements to the network’s block production process. With the proposed innovations, Buterin aims to promote greater transparency and distribution in block creation, cautioning, however, that while these upgrades target current centralization risks, new vulnerabilities could simply shift to other areas of the ecosystem.
New Architectures: ePBS and Enhanced Block Production
Looking ahead to the Glamsterdam upgrade, Buterin has highlighted the intended adoption of the ‘enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation’ (ePBS) mechanism. This system intentionally splits the roles of block proposers and builders, allowing proposers to delegate block creation to a decentralized marketplace of block builders. The objective is clear: to mitigate concentration among block builders and prevent it from feeding into centralization among Ethereum validators.
Buterin insists that ePBS alone cannot eliminate the risk of centralization in block building; rather, it separates proposing and building responsibilities. According to him, this distinction will be critical in shaping Ethereum’s security architecture and determining which risks may emerge as the protocol evolves in future years.
To further bolster decentralization, another model under consideration is Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL). FOCIL would empower a random selection of 16 validators per block to nominate transactions that must be included. Should any mandated transaction be omitted, the block can be rejected by the network. This design guarantees that even if block production becomes highly concentrated, key transactions will still be processed by the system.
Buterin has proposed expanding this concept into ‘Big FOCIL,’ an ambitious extension that might enforce inclusion for all transactions. Under this model, participants could be assigned responsibility for different sender addresses to prevent transaction clashes, paving the way for robust, distributed inclusion mechanisms.
MEV Pressures, Encrypted Pools, and Privacy Layers
Buterin is also drawing attention to the persistent challenges posed by “toxic MEV” (Maximum Extractable Value)—practices that allow certain actors to front-run or sandwich transactions for personal advantage, often to the detriment of ordinary users. These blockchain-level manipulations highlight the urgent need for stronger countermeasures.
He has pointed to the promise of encrypted transaction pools—where transactions remain concealed until they are included in a block—as a way to combat premature information leaks that enable exploitation. However, he underscores that the infrastructure to ensure timely decryption and validation of transactions is still in development.
Additionally, Buterin has called for greater scrutiny of the transaction relay layer, which connects user wallets to blockchain nodes. Although this communication step happens outside the main chain, it is susceptible to surveillance and manipulation before transactions reach the network. Technologies such as Tor-based routing, Ethereum-specific anonymizing mixers, and low-latency options like Flashnet could offer mitigation. Buterin also noted the Kohaku initiative, which aims to provide flexible support for both network-based and on-chain privacy protocols.
Distributed Production and Long-Term Vision
Envisioning Ethereum’s evolution, Buterin wants to see the network’s block production resemble the peer-to-peer architecture of BitTorrent, where no single node manages all data and operations are broadly dispersed.
Technical hurdles persist: Ethereum’s global state mechanism is highly synchronized, making truly distributed block production a complex endeavor, since each transaction can potentially depend on every other. Still, Buterin notes that many transactions could be transitioned to new, more limited types that do not require interaction with the full global state—reduced in scope, and therefore cheaper and simpler.
He emphasizes that while these ideas remain drafts with no concrete timeline or roadmap, the ultimate aim is to minimize the influence of any single participant. The focus, he stresses, is to move toward a modular and distributed block architecture, reducing risks of centralization as Ethereum matures.
