Yo, so check this out. In the first half of October, two total legends in the Ethereum game, Beaverbuild and Titan Builder, have been dominating the scene, cranking out a sick 88.7% of all blocks on the mainnet. That’s kinda wild, right? Some of the crypto experts are raising eyebrows about how centralized that is for the second biggest blockchain out there.
So, this sharp dude named Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher with the Ethereum Foundation, dropped some knowledge on Oct. 17. He said this whole thing is happening because of private order flow (XOF) getting sold by certain apps. Basically, it’s messing with the competition among builders in the block auction, which sucks because it means there are fewer transactions being shared. Not cool, man.
Decentralization is like the lifeblood of Ethereum. If too much power gets into a few hands, these centralized players could start playing favorites with transactions, and that’s totally against what blockchain is all about.
But hold up – not everyone is freaking out about this. Ryan Lee from Bitget Research, who’s a big deal in analyzing this stuff, thinks it’s not the end of the world. He’s all about that proposer-builder separation, saying that proposers can’t see what’s inside the blocks. They just pick the most profitable ones from the builders. So, no one’s really getting to cherry-pick transactions, you know?
Lee was like, “Neither builders nor validators can control which transactions are on-chain or off-chain, easing the worries about centralization.” Makes sense, right?
Still, there are those who aren’t fully convinced, like Kishan Kumar, a software engineer. He’s got his eye on powerful validators. He warned that those guys could mess with the network by prioritizing certain transactions to snag the max extractable value (MEV), which is a no-go for true decentralization.
Now, here’s the kicker: to curb these centralization issues, Ethereum might need to crank up its censorship resistance. Wahrstätter mentioned that if stronger censorship resistance was in place, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. They’re working on it, though, with lots of research going on. But new challenges like XOF are still lurking around, which is kinda sketch.
On the bright side, the Ethereum validator count has shot up over 30% this past year, thanks to more institutions jumping into crypto. That’s got to be a good thing for keeping things decentralized, bro! So, while there are some concerns, Ethereum’s still pushing forward. Let’s see where it goes!
Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/two-ethereum-entities-produced-88-blocks-centralization-concerns
