Ethereum researchers propose FOCIL as censorship-resistance headliner for Hegota upgrade

Ethereum researchers are considering a new mechanism designed to harden the network’s censorship resistance as the headline proposal for its next major protocol upgrade, dubbed Hegota.

Thomas Thiery, also known as "soispoke," has proposed Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL or EIP-7805) as the lead feature for the Hegota upgrade, which is expected to follow Glamsterdam later this year.

The proposal was previously deferred from the Glamsterdam fork but has now been put forward as a central pillar of Hegota’s design. Thiery is a researcher with the Ethereum Foundation’s Robust Incentives Group, where his work has focused on censorship resistance, proposer–builder separation, and block production centralization — areas directly targeted by the FOCIL design. Hegota was named late last year as the upgrade following Glamsterdam, as Ethereum developers mapped out the network’s 2026 roadmap.

FOCIL's proposal

FOCIL is intended to provide a protocol-level guarantee that any transaction deemed valid under Ethereum’s rules will be included onchain within a bounded timeframe. It does so by allowing multiple validators, rather than a single block builder, to enforce transaction inclusion through Ethereum’s fork-choice rule. Thiery says this reduces the power of centralized intermediaries to arbitrarily filter or delay transactions.

The proposal aims to directly address concerns around the growing centralization of Ethereum’s builder market, which has been driven by MEV extraction and increasing vertical integration between builders, relays, and searchers. As Ethereum scales and becomes more dependent on specialized infrastructure, researchers argue that censorship resistance should be enforced at the protocol level rather than left to off-chain market dynamics.

"Without FOCIL, this core Ethereum value is not actually guaranteed, leaving the protocol vulnerable to mass censorship events," Thiery stated.

As a headliner proposal, FOCIL aligns with Hegota’s broader focus on integrated technical guarantees for fair and neutral transaction inclusion. According to its author, it would allow validators to contribute to censorship resistance without needing to run local builders or forgo MEV rewards, while giving users and applications stronger assurances that transactions cannot be quietly suppressed.

Tradeoffs

The proposal does come with tradeoffs.

FOCIL would add some protocol complexity and does not currently support blob transactions or private MEV-carrying transactions — areas that researchers have said will need to be addressed through separate upgrades. Proponents also urged that Ethereum should proactively guard against large-scale censorship events, even if such behavior is limited today.

"Today, very few transactions are censored by dominant builders and relays," he wrote. "However, this was not always the case, and it can change suddenly and unpredictably. Our view is that Ethereum should be designed to be robust and resilient for decades to come and proactively preventing large-scale censorship through reliable inclusion guarantees, rather than being caught off guard and having to react."