By Tyler Warner
5 min read
Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.
GM!
Today’s top news:
The latest Ethereum upgrade has been announced, with a very interesting core focus.
Ethereum developers confirmed FOCIL (Fork-Choice-Enforced Inclusion Lists as EIP-7805) for the Hegota network upgrade, targeted for H2 2026.
The decision came at the Feb 19 All Core Devs call, backed by Vitalik Buterin.
It works like this: every block, 17 validators are randomly selected to submit inclusion lists of valid transactions they’ve seen and block producers must include those transactions or risk their block getting rejected by the network. Thus no single validator controls the list and no single validator can censor it.
FOCIL ships alongside EIP-8141, which makes smart contract wallets, multisigs, quantum-resistant wallets, and privacy tools a core part of Ethereum.
Vitalik Buterin called FOCIL the foundation of a “cypherpunk principled non-ugly Ethereum,” describing it as a return to the original ethos of the network.
“ETH devs, I love you. You mean well. But when you create an EIP to solve the problem of 'filtering out transactions with sanctioned addresses' and your solution is 'to allow validators to impose constraints on builders by force-including transactions in their blocks'... we have a problem, a big problem. And if you don't see it, you're either being naive or reckless.” -Developer Ameen Soleimani, on X
Censorship resistance sounds like a niche concern until you realize what it actually means.
No validator, no government, no exchange, and no pressure campaign can decide which transactions get processed on Ethereum. Your transaction either meets the protocol rules or it doesn’t.
That matters for the average person more than it might seem.
The financial system you use today can freeze your assets, block payments to certain countries, flag your account for reasons you’ll never fully understand, and reverse transactions after the fact. Banks do it. PayPal does it. Visa does it. They follow rules and manage risk. The result is a system where access to your money depends on staying in someone else’s good graces.
And conceptually, blockchains can succumb to that same system (via centralization, technical design, etc.).
Ethereum with FOCIL works differently. Once a transaction hits the mempool and meets the rules, the network has to process it. Privacy tools, cross-border transfers, and wallets the government has flagged all get the same treatment as any other valid transaction.
It’s a net positive for a global, decentralized, permissionless payments system.
But it likely will have some compliance impact down the line.
For example, someone in the U.S. cannot legally send money to someone in Iran. Banks would block that transaction. Ethereum will not—it will process it. By design.
But that leaves compliance up to the user (or perhaps the protocol). And the U.S. government probably won’t like that.
Expect this to be a discussion item in crypto discussions to come…
Decrypt-a-cookie
This website or its third-party tools use cookies. Cookie policy By clicking the accept button, you agree to the use of cookies.