'Ethereum Is Going Hard': Vitalik Buterin Backs Censorship Resistance Upgrade
In brief
- FOCIL will headline Ethereum’s Hegota upgrade set for later in 2026.
- The proposal forces the inclusion of valid transactions to limit censorship.
- Critics warn it could expose validators to unforeseen risk, particularly when it comes to sanctioned addresses.
Ethereum is doubling down on its cypherpunk roots. Developers have scheduled Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, or FOCIL, as the consensus-layer headliner for the network’s upcoming Hegota upgrade. The Hegota upgrade is a coordinated change to the network’s core rules that developers expect to roll out in the second half of 2026. The proposal, entered as EIP-7805, is designed to ensure that Ethereum remains censorship-resistant at the protocol level by forcing validators to include all transactions. With FOCIL, if a proposed block ignores valid transactions from inclusion lists, then the chain can fork away from it, guaranteeing that any valid public-mempool transaction gets included within a bounded number of slots.
While some validators in the past have ignored certain transactions, including those tied to sanctioned addresses or protocols—such as the once-sanctioned Tornado Cash—this network change would ensure they’re included. In an X post on Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said FOCIL works in combination with EIP-8141, which he said makes smart accounts—including multisig, quantum-resistant signatures, key changes, and gas sponsorship—“first-class citizens.” “FOCIL enables censorship-resistant rapid inclusion of any transaction,” Buterin wrote. “Hence, with FOCIL and 8141 together, anything, including smart wallet txs, gas sponsored txs, and even privacy protocol txs, can be included on-chain through one of 17 different actors (the proposer or the includers) that are all chosen randomly in each slot.”
There is also an important synergy between FOCIL and AA (EIP-8141, which is based on 7701):
8141 makes not just smart accounts (including multisig, quantum-resistant signatures, key changes, gas sponsorship) first-class citizens, it also can do the same for privacy protocols… https://t.co/wLCEuq66eI
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 19, 2026
According to Buterin, the move “gives guaranteed rapid inclusion,” meaning that almost any valid transaction would be included within one to two slots, even in an “adversarial environment.” “Ethereum is going hard,” Buterin wrote. Critics, including Ethereum developer Ameen Soleimani, argue FOCIL could have unforeseen ramifications for network validators. “ETH devs, I love you. You mean well. But when you create an EIP to solve the problem of ‘filtering out transactions with sanctioned addresses’ and your solution is ‘to allow validators to impose constraints on builders by force-including transactions in their blocks’… we have a problem, a big problem,” he wrote on X in August. “And if you don’t see it, you’re either being naive or reckless.” Still, many Ethereum developers argue that FOCIL brings more benefits than downsides. In a separate post on X on Friday, Buterin described a broader ambition to create a “cypherpunk” ethos in Ethereum. “I’m actually trying to do something even more ambitious: Create ‘cypherpunk principled non-ugly Ethereum’ as a bolt-on to the present-day system, in a way that’s as tightly integrated and interoperable as possible, and then grow it over time,” Buterin wrote.
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