Vitalik’s FOCIL Upgrade Crusade: Defending Ethereum’s Core Neutrality Against All Odds

Ethereum's co-founder makes his boldest move yet to preserve the network's foundational principle—just as corporate interests circle like vultures.

The Neutrality Imperative

Vitalik Buterin isn't just proposing another technical upgrade; he's mounting a philosophical defense of Ethereum's soul. The FOCIL enhancement tackles mounting concerns about network centralization head-on—rewriting core protocols to ensure no single entity can dominate transaction sequencing or validation rights.

Architecture Over Appeasement

Forget polite consensus-building. This upgrade forces nodes to adopt stricter decentralization requirements—slashing maximum stake concentrations and implementing rotational validation assignments. The changes hit validator profitability models hard, but Buterin argues the trade-off is non-negotiable: 'Neutrality isn't a feature—it's the entire point.'

Wall Street's Already Pricing In the Chaos

Meanwhile, hedge funds are reportedly building arbitrage models around the expected validator shakeout—because nothing screams 'decentralization' like institutions profiting from protocol turbulence. The upgrade may protect Ethereum from corporate capture, but it can't stop traders from turning philosophical purity into another revenue stream.

Ethereum either evolves on its original terms—or becomes just another corporate blockchain with better branding.

Reflexer Labs executive warns about the risk of FOCIL

Meanwhile, not everyone within the Ethereum community is sold on FOCIL like Buterin. Reflexer Labs co-founder Ameen Soleimani disagreed with the idea, noting that it creates a big problem and failure to see the potential issues is either “naive or reckless.”

In his opinion, Ethereum’s current censorship resistance model has worked by making staking permissionless and allowing stakers to decide which transactions they want to include. He noted that even if 99% of staking nodes decide to censor Tornado Cash transactions, the transaction will still go through, only that it would be 100x longer than usual.

Thus, he believes this model already gives node operators in countries such as the US the opportunity to filter out sanctioned addresses and avoid the associated legal risks of processing sanctioned transactions, while validators in other countries can still process such transactions.

Soleimani also believes the risks of the oligopoly of block builders might be over-exaggerated, noting that transactions from sanctioned addresses are still being processed on Ethereum.

He said:

“Even with the block builder oligopoly, only 2 out of 3 of the block builders are censoring, and as the OP mentioned, 90% of the rest of the validator set is NOT engaging in censorship.”

However, he warned that FOCIL will force validators to include transactions from sanctioned addresses, which could open them up to legal liability. Although he acknowledges that the plan seeks to distribute the responsibility to other validators who are not chosen for the block, he does not believe that will stop authorities from coming after validators.

As he noted, the US government could go after validators even with their diminished responsibility, go after the attesters who included transactions from sanctioned addresses in a block, or even prosecute Ethereum Core developers who designed FOCIL. Soleimani referenced the prosecution of Tornado Cash developers.

Instead of FOCIL, Soleimani believes Ethereum should stick with the current system, which relies on attesters who are altruistic enough to include transactions from sanctioned addresses into Ethereum blocks. He added that active research is still ongoing on other censorship-resistant mechanisms that could be implemented.

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