Activists are shutting down Ethereum, what’s going on?

Last year, the crypto mixer Tornado Cash was subject to sanctions by the United States. Soon after, several parties in the crypto industry announced that they would comply with the sanctions.

Ethereum introduced a controversial feature that, in theory, could censor any transaction. A group of activist developers temporarily shut down the entire Ethereum network as a protest on Thursday.

Ethereum validators practice censorship

OAbout a month after the US Treasury Department announced that Tornado Cash became illegal for US residents company Flashbots released a program that allowed Ethereum validators to automatically comply with the sanctions. With a so-called MEV boost relay, certain transactions on Ethereum would simply not be included in the blockchain.

Dthis little program was widely used by validators in just a few months. They are paid extra to use the software as a financial incentive.

According to critics, this percentage has become so high so quickly because Ethereum is very centralized. The validators Coinbase and Lido together held 42% of all ETH in the staking contract shortly after the Merge upgrade. These are centralized companies, and the US government requires them to comply with the law in order to do their thing.

Attack on Ethereum in protest

But the research team Special Mechanisms Group (SMG) not happy with the censorship. In protest, they shut down the entire Ethereum blockchain for 12 seconds to draw attention to the censorship. There was only one here transaction required, which cost only 0.05 ETH or 88.11 euros.

On Twitter, the organization explains that 12 seconds may not seem long, but speed and reliability are extra important for a financial network. The organization calls for software updates that counter censorship.

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So it writes in a proposal about separating the proposers from blocks on the blockchain and the producers. In theory, this prevents conflicts of interest and it even makes the network faster.

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