As Censorship on Ethereum Begins, Could This Open-Sourced Code Help Counter It?
Flashbots’ accelerated code release comes amid U.S. regulatory crackdown on crypto mixer Tornado Cash for sanctions violations.
Flashbots, the team of developers behind MEV-Boost, a critical piece of software for the next phase of Ethereum, has decided to accelerate the open-sourcing of some of its code as the broader Ethereum community frets over looming risks of transaction censorship.
The move comes in reaction to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) banning Americans from using Tornado Cash, a service that anonymizes transactions, because it abetted money laundering. It also followed the arrest of Alexey Pertsev, who wrote the code for the mixer, banning Americans from using Tornado Cash.
MEV-Boost is an optional piece of software which, come the Ethereum Merge to proof-of-stake (PoS) in September, will separate “builders” who create blocks of transactions from the “proposers” who propagate those blocks out to the wider network.
Flashbots pitches its software as a way to help validators – the computers that process transactions on Ethereum’s PoS network – more easily (and equitably) extract Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), extra income that validators can earn by strategically selecting the transactions that they add to a given block.