Vitalik Buterin unveils Ethereum blockchain roadmap ahead of Glumsterdam protocol update

TLDR

Ethereum EPBS allows proponents to tap into a free, permissionless builder market without fueling centralization.

Big FOCIL groups subsets of transactions by sender address, cutting out duplication while increasing censorship resistance.

Encrypted mempools hide the transaction data until completion, eliminating front-running and sandwich attack windows.

Kohaku's initiative is expected to add pluggable network-layer privacy support for anonymous transaction routing.

Ethereum's block building pipeline is in the middle of a set of planned changes related to the upcoming Glamsterdam update.

Vitalik Buterin lays out these ideas in a detailed post covering censorship resistance, MEV mitigation, encrypted memes, and network-layer privacy.

The roadmap targets both in-protocol and out-of-protocol components. Together, these measures aim to reduce developer centralization while protecting users from exploitative transaction orders in the network.

FOCIL and Big FOCIL aimed at censorship

FOCIL marks one of the first concrete steps towards multi-participant block construction. The method requires 16 randomly selected verifiers to assign each set of transactions.

Those transactions must appear somewhere in the block or the block will be rejected entirely. This design ensures censorship resistance even in the case of a total developer recording.

Buterin says FOCIL prohibits isolation even if a single actor controls all of the block buildings. A more comprehensive version, known as Big FOCIL, entered the discussion at the next possible level.

Under that model, FOCILers collectively cover all transactions in a block. Each participant, by default, contains a subset bound to the first hex character of the sender's address.

The system avoids duplication through an address-based allocation structure. The risk of censored transactions being seen twice, and then only the cost of delay in one place.

As a result, the developer's role may become increasingly narrow. It may eventually cover only MEV-related activities such as DEX arbitrage and state transfer calculations.

This change represents a significant reduction in the power held by block builders. The change doesn't eliminate builders, but it changes how much influence they have.

Buterin formulated it as a logical extension of the FOCIL approach. It moves Ethereum to a more decentralized, trust-less construction process.

Encrypted Mempools provide protection against toxic MEV

Encrypted membranes have been proposed as one of the most discussed solutions for toxic MEV. Practices like sandwiching and front-running cause direct financial harm to consumers.

Encryption prevents any party from seeing the content of the transaction before it enters the block. That removes the window these attacks currently rely on.

The strategy works by hiding the transaction until the inclusion is confirmed. No one can enmesh or reorder within that window.

However, the technical test is not easy and remains in active research. Ensuring transaction integrity in a membrane-friendly format while maintaining encryption is complex.

An additional challenge involves ensuring that decryption only takes place after the block has been completed. To solve this problem, researchers are exploring several encryption techniques.

No single approach has yet been adopted, but progress continues. The goal is a user-friendly and abuse-resistant system.

Network-layer anonymity closes a persistent privacy gap.

The transaction gateway layer has long been an under-represented area in MEV and privacy discussions. An aggressive observer who sees a transaction in transit can act before it reaches the chain.

They can sandwich DeFi businesses, frustrate users with preemptive actions, or expose private activity on-chain. The damage may occur well before an on-chain privacy protocol is implemented.

Buterin pointed out the growing research in this area. Tools like Tor routing, Ethereum-based mixnets, and latency-minimized designs like Flashnet are all under consideration.

These approaches are anonymizing the way a transaction goes from user to block. The Kohaku initiative is expected to integrate pluggable support for such protocols.

There is also a need to use the network layer for pre-embedded transaction management. Passive command matching for DeFi activity can improve the performance quality of users.

But enabling that without opening the door to a sandwich requires careful encryption design. This remains an open challenge for researchers working in space.

Looking further ahead, Buterin outlines a loosely distributed architecture vision for how BitTorrent works. The idea involves creating new, cheaper forms of transactions that don't require global government access.

That allows most of the activity to flow through a fully distributed pipeline. Existing forms of marketing will remain in place but will carry relatively high costs.