Flashbots co-founder steps down after disagreements with team over censorship

Stephane Gosselin, co-founder of Flashbots, last month resigned from the maximal extracted value (MEV)  service following disagreements with the team, he announced on Twitter.

For a diverse and competitive MEV ecosystem, it is crucial to preserve censorship resistance,  Gosselin said in a statement. Gosselin also said he was proud of what the project had achieved.

“In the short term, I am hopeful that validators will avoid connecting to relays that perform censorship. Blockspace suppliers putting economic pressure against censorship will go a long way to making sure it does not become ubiquitous.” Gosselin told The Block via direct message on Twitter.

Since The Merge a relative consolidation of Ethereum validators on popular staking pools that use Flashbots relays occurred. The MEV provider’s decision to ignore transactions from sanctioned mixing service Tornado Cash has drawn criticism that Flashbots is enabling censorship on the blockchain.

Concerns over the apparent censorship prompted a response from Flashbots Product Lead Robert Miller, who said the company is exploring ways to reduce dominance, and has open-sourced its code.

Gosselin described how Flashbots makes markets more efficient in a Season 4 episode of The Scoop.

L