If Ethereum is to remain permissionless, neutral, & accessible to all, it must ensure that no single entity or group has the power to filter or exclude transactions. This responsibility largely falls on solo stakers.
Solo stakers play a pivotal role in maintaining Ethereum’s censorship resistance by independently validating transactions & building blocks, ensuring that the network remains resilient against manipulation. However, the current Ethereum landscape forces these individual participants to make a difficult choice: either prioritize censorship resistance at the cost of profitability or maximize earnings while contributing to potential transaction filtering.
This is where FOCIL (Fork-choice enforced Inclusion Lists) comes into play. FOCIL is an innovative mechanism designed to ensure that solo stakers can continue to uphold Ethereum’s censorship resistance without sacrificing financial rewards.
By aligning incentives in a way that benefits both the individual staker & the broader network, FOCIL offers a path forward that safeguards Ethereum’s core principles while maintaining economic viability for validators.
Who Are Solo Stakers?
Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) model relies on validators to propose & finalize blocks, ensuring that transactions are processed efficiently & fairly. Validators can be broadly categorized into two groups: solo stakers & institutional/pool validators.
Solo stakers are individual participants who run their own validator nodes without relying on staking pools or third-party intermediaries. They operate independently, maintaining full control over their staking rewards & decision-making processes. Unlike large validators, who often have commercial interests at heart, solo stakers prioritize network decentralization & censorship resistance.
In contrast, institutional & pool validators aggregate funds from multiple users & control a significant share of block proposals. While they offer convenience & efficiency, their centralization poses risks, including greater susceptibility to censorship & regulatory pressure.
Solo stakers are essential to Ethereum’s decentralization because they increase validator diversity, ensuring that no single entity gains excessive control over transaction processing. More importantly, their independence allows them to resist censorship pressures that institutional validators might succumb to due to financial incentives or regulatory requirements.
Solo Stakers vs. Censorship Resistance
The Ethereum network today relies heavily on solo stakers to maintain its censorship resistance. Unlike large validators, who optimize for maximum profit, solo stakers build blocks locally, ensuring that transactions are included based on network fairness rather than financial gain. The problem is that this commitment to uncensored block-building comes at a cost.
Important point. Censorship resistance on Ethereum currently ultimately relies on a minority of altruistic small stakers.
— ansgar.eth 🦇🔊 .oO (@adietrichs) February 21, 2025
FOCIL will remove that reliance, and make the chain censorship resistant even with purely economically rational block proposers. https://t.co/GotzazjvQn
Most large validators use MEV-Boost, a system that extracts additional revenue by selecting the most profitable transactions to include in blocks. While this maximizes financial rewards, it creates a risk of transaction censorship, as builders may be incentivized to exclude certain transactions.
Solo stakers, on the other hand, avoid MEV-Boost to maintain censorship resistance, but in doing so, they lose out on significant profits.
This financial trade-off makes it difficult for solo stakers to sustain their operations long-term. Many are forced to either join staking pools—further centralizing Ethereum—or stop validating altogether. If this trend continues, Ethereum could become increasingly reliant on large staking entities, making censorship more feasible & undermining the network’s core values.
Introduction to FOCIL
FOCIL (Fork-choice enforced Inclusion Lists) offers a solution to the dilemma faced by solo stakers. By integrating FOCIL, Ethereum can ensure that solo stakers are not only able to uphold censorship resistance but also earn competitive rewards without financial sacrifices.
FOCIL works by allowing solo stakers to signal which transactions should be included in a block, even when using MEV-Boost. This means that rather than having to choose between profitability & censorship resistance, solo stakers can do both—secure Ethereum while also benefiting from additional rewards.
The result is a more balanced system where inclusion lists enforce a fairer transaction selection process, ensuring that censorship is actively resisted across the network. By implementing FOCIL, Ethereum can strengthen its decentralized validator base, reduce reliance on large staking pools, & create a network where every validator—regardless of size—can contribute to censorship resistance without financial trade-offs.
Additionally, FOCIL supports Ethereum’s scalability efforts by making PBS & APS more viable, ensuring a more equitable transaction validation process.
Future of Ethereum Staking
If Ethereum is to remain a truly decentralized, permissionless network, the community must actively support & incentivize solo stakers. Without them, the network risks becoming dominated by a handful of institutional validators, making censorship easier & decentralization weaker.
FOCIL provides an elegant, effective solution to this issue, ensuring that solo stakers can continue playing their essential role without suffering financial penalties. By enabling solo stakers to participate in inclusion lists while still benefiting from MEV-Boost, FOCIL eliminates the long-standing trade-off between censorship resistance & profitability.
As the network grows, it must prioritize solutions that protect decentralization & validator diversity. Ethereum’s long-term success depends on the strength & diversity of its validators.
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