ETH staking on top exchanges contributes to Ethereum censorship: Data

For most crypto ecosystems, being compliant with federal sanctions have a negative impact on its global reach. However, when it comes to Ethereum, investors have significant power to decide the degree of compliance the ecosystem obeys.

Nearly 60% of all post-Merge Ethereum blocks comply with the United States sanctions put forth by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). While the crypto community stands against this transformation, many fail to realize their own contribution to helping Ethereum attain total OFAC compliance.

One of the biggest factors harming Ethereum’s credible neutrality is the use of censoring MEV relays by crypto ecosystems and exchanges. Miner extractable value (MEV) relays work as a mediator between block producers and block builders, which are being used by prominent crypto players, such as Binance, Celsius Network, Coinbase, Kraken and Cream Finance, to name a few.

Top Ethereum censorship offenders leaderboard. Source: MEV Watch

Users staking Ether (ETH) on platforms (as shown above) that run censoring MEV relays on their validators are directly contributing to the censorship of Ethereum. Crypto platforms can help remediate the situation by adopting a non-censoring MEV-boost relay.

For validators and relay operators, some of the popular MEV-boost relays that don’t promote censorship include Ultra Sound Money, Agnostic Boost, Aestus, BloXroute Max Profit, BloxRoute Ethical, Manifold and Relayooor.

OFAC compliance data for last 100 Ethereum blocks. Source: MEV Watch

At the time of writing, 67 of the last 100 Ethereum blocks were found enforcing OFAC compliance.

As investors, it is important to understand that protocol-level censorship is deterrent to crypto’s goal of unleashing open and inclusive finance. Hence, it becomes important for both investors and service providers to opt for non-censoring MEV-boost relays.

Related: BNB Chain now has more unique addresses than Ethereum, developer says

The Ethereum ecosystem recently witnessed two dormant addresses wake up after four years to transfer 22,982 ETH.

#PeckShieldAlert 2 Dormant addresses transferred 22,982 $ETH (~27.2M) to 2 fresh addresses, their last movement was October 2018 (1,535 days ago).
These $ETH originated from Genesis and Poloniex pic.twitter.com/MXKpLnypif

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) December 19, 2022

The ETH transfers in question can be traced back to trading platforms Genesis and Poloniex where the unknown whales transferred 13,103.99 ETH and 9,878 ETH, respectively.

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