BASED DEGEN

In defence of FOCIL Note: I genuinely think that more eyes on major EIPs are always a net positive. The more visibility and constructive feedback we get, the more likely we are to ship meaningful, important upgrades for Ethereum. • FOCIL is about adding multiple proposers that participate in block construction each slot to avoid single points of failure (xitter.cf/VitalikButerin/status/…). This is particularly useful to participate in the distributed block building process and impose constraints on sophisticated/centralized builders that build more than 90% of all blocks today via MEV-boost (mevboost.pics/). While there is work towards more decentralized block builders, the inherent economies of scale due to MEV mean builders are likely to stay centralized in the near to medium term. • Even if you think Ethereum is doing fine today in terms of censorship resistance (CR) and credible neutrality, it’s unrealistic to assume the network will remain as it is. Most would agree that Ethereum needs to keep scaling (e.g., raising the gas limit, zkEVMs blog.ethereum.org/2025/07/10…), which likely implies a future in which solo stakers can’t locally build and prove blocks at full capacity. This leaves the network even more vulnerable to a few centralized and sophisticated entities than today, not just from a censorship perspective but also from a liveness one. And that’s why we need FOCIL: To keep builders honest, and to stop relying on altruistic local builders to preserve CR (not just altruistic btw, they’re actually losing a lot of money doing that and it’s just not sustainable). • It is precisely because Ethereum is permissionless and censorship resistant that nations and large institutions will be comfortable using it. Otherwise, they’re exposed to competitors or adversarial entities coercing the network into excluding their transactions. • I personally think being an Ethereum validator means you must not only put 32 ETH at stake to earn yield, but also actively perform duties to keep Ethereum secure and help preserve its core values, some of which are (and always have been) censorship resistance and permissionlessness. nit: Please refer to the EIP as the most recent, accurate FOCIL doc: eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7…