Ethereum's Censorship Shield gm Bankless Nation,
Ethereum is doubling down on its values as it builds for the future. Meet FOCIL. Today's Issue ⬇️ - ☀️ Need to Know: OpenClaw's Crypto Ban
The popular open-source tool is sick of crypto spam. - 🗣️ Analysis: Ethereum's Censorship Shield
How FOCIL hardens the network. - 🎧 Latest Pod: ETH's Last Major Upgrade?
The L1 zkEVM changes the game.
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. . . NEED TO KNOW OpenClaw's Crypto Ban - 🦞 OpenClaw Declares War on Crypto Content. The wildly popular agent development platform is banning users from its Discord who mention crypto.
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📸 Daily Market Snapshot: BTC spent the day attempting to build back after a $3K flash crash on Sunday, but trended lower Monday, dropping below $64K as the rest of the market reeled from a higher-than-expected U.S. unemployment data release. | Prices as of 5pm ET | 24hr | 7d |  | Crypto $2.22T | ↘ 3.9% | ↘ 5.7% |  | BTC $64,631 | ↘ 4.2% | ↘ 5.6% |  | ETH $1,866 | ↘ 3.9% | ↘ 6.2% |
. . . ANALYSIS Ethereum Is Getting a Censorship Shield with EIP-7805 Ethereum just made one of its most consequential protocol decisions yet. EIP-7805, better known as FOCIL (short for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists), has been greenlit as "Scheduled for Inclusion" and named the consensus layer headliner for Ethereum's upcoming Hegotá upgrade. As Ethereum researcher Thomas Thiery (a.k.a. soispoke.eth), one of FOCIL's primary champions, said regarding the news: "In today's world, it's remarkable that the Ethereum community can stand behind protocol upgrades that reinforce core cypherpunk values. It's truly unique, and I'm proud to be working on a technical and social project that stands for freedom and equal access."
That's no small praise from someone who understands FOCIL as well as just about anyone, but if you're still catching up on what FOCIL means for Ethereum, then let's run through the basics. The Problem FOCIL SolvesIn Ethereum today, the right to build blocks has largely been auctioned off to specialized entities called builders, via "out-of-protocol" proposer-builder separation (PBS). Accordingly, many Ethereum validators typically don't build the blocks they propose. Instead, they accept pre-built blocks from external builders who compete to offer the highest fees. The result of this dynamic? A handful of sophisticated builders dominate block production. This model is economically efficient, but it introduces censorship risk: a builder that refuses to include certain transactions, whether for regulatory reasons or otherwise, can keep those transactions off the chain. And since a small number of builders win the vast majority of blocks, a coordinated refusal across some of them could meaningfully delay or deny inclusion for targeted users or apps. FOCIL is Ethereum's answer to that problem. How FOCIL WorksWhile the underlying details are quite technical, FOCIL's mechanism is fairly straightforward. For each Ethereum slot, a committee of 16 validators is pseudorandomly selected as "inclusion list (IL) committee members." These validators each independently scan the public mempool and assemble a short list of pending transactions they think should be in the next block. Each list is capped at 8 kilobytes. Every committee member broadcasts their list across the network early in the slot's formation. The proposer of the next block and Ethereum attesters then collect these lists. The proposer must construct a block that satisfies the transactions across all of the ILs it received. Conversely, attesters will only vote for a block that includes the IL-specified transactions. If a block skips valid IL transactions that could have fit, attesters won't attest to it and the block won't become canonical. This is what "fork-choice enforced" means. The inclusion requirement isn't a social norm or a gentleman's agreement. It's wired into the fork-choice rule itself. Under this paradigm, skipping IL transactions will be a protocol violation that gets your block ignored. Why FOCIL MattersThe out-of-protocol PBS reality today means a hostile builder or a set of colluding ones can suppress any transaction or class of transactions they want. FOCIL will be a shield against this kind of threat. An IL committee is drawn randomly from the full validator set each slot, so censoring a transaction will now require neutralizing a rotating group of 16 validators or hoping none of the 16 includes the targeted transaction in their IL. That's a very hard guarantee to break over any window of time. There's also an important trust-minimization thrust here. Right now, users have no protocol-level recourse if a builder refuses their transaction. In other words, inclusion depends on trusting builders to behave. In response, FOCIL will remove that dependency entirely. And FOCIL will do so without touching ordering, i.e. where in the block things land. Builders will retain their economic role but lose their veto power. The Synergies to ComeThe significance of FOCIL's arrival is even bigger when you consider where it fits in Ethereum's roadmap in the context of other upcoming features. For instance, Vitalik Buterin recently highlighted how FOCIL and the "Frame Transaction" EIP-8141 proposal would be synergistic. Specifically, Vitalik noted: "[W]ith FOCIL and 8141 together, anything, including smart wallet txs, gas sponsored txs, and even privacy protocol txs, can be included onchain through one of 17 different actors (the proposer or the includers) that are all chosen randomly in each slot.
This gives us guaranteed rapid inclusion, meaning almost certainly within 1-2 slots, of any such tx, even in an adversarial environment."
And this is just one example of FOCIL's combinational potential. More upcoming protocol features will unlock further synergies with this mechanism and further harden Ethereum. Zooming OutMost chains optimize for throughput and UX, while few invest their upgrade cycles in neutrality guarantees. Ethereum is among the few then, with FOCIL enshrining censorship resistance directly into its network. For now, the thing to watch is implementation progress, which you can follow using the meetfocil.eth.limo tracker. Hegotá is slated for late 2026, and client teams have begun implementations across both Ethereum's consensus and execution layers, with several having cleared the first two of six milestones on the way. Another way of looking at it? Ethereum is on the cusp of hardness that is fit to anchor its world ledger vision for decades to come.  FRIEND & SPONSOR: READY (FORMERLY ARGENT) Ready makes going bankless simple. Pay with USDC worldwide with zero FX fees and earn up to 3% cashback. Start spending instantly with a virtual card and choose between a free or paid plan. Keep control of your assets. Bankless readers get 20% off Metal with code BANKLESS20 . . . LATEST PODCAST The Last Major ETH Upgrade? Ethereum’s next big leap might not look like a single “flip the switch” moment—but it could change how the chain verifies everything. In this episode, Ansgar Dietrichs comes back to unpack the zkEVM – plus: why “re-executing every block” has been Ethereum’s hidden scaling tax, how real-time proofs finally make a different verification model viable, and what it would take to transition safely without sacrificing the verifiability that keeps Ethereum credibly neutral. They explore the three true bottlenecks of blockchain scaling (compute, IO, bandwidth), the roadmap from optional proofs to mandatory proofs, and why client diversity could look radically different in a ZK-native future. Tune into the full episode 👇 | 
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