Ethereum is one step closer to full censorship due to OFAC compliance

Considering that protocol-level censorship is an obstacle to the crypto ecosystem’s goal of highly open and accessible finance, the community is following Ethereum’s increasing compliance with the standards set by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC ). In the last 24 hours, the Ethereum network was found to have enforced OFAC compliance on more than 73% of its blocks.

In October 2022, Cointelegraph reported that censorship concerns were growing after it was found that 51% of Ethereum blocks met OFAC standards. However, data from mevWatch confirmed that OFAC-compliant block mining increased on a daily basis to 73% as of November 3rd.

Some MEV-Boost relays, which are regulated by OFAC, will censor certain transactions. Therefore, to ensure the neutrality of Ethereum (ETH), the relay network must adopt uncensored MEV-Boost.

Ethereum validators can reduce OFAC compliance by removing MEV-Boost relays that censor transactions, such as BloXroute Max Profit, BloxRoute Ethical, Manifold, and Relayooor from their setup.

OFAC compliance allows a US government agency to enforce economic and trade sanctions. Previously, the agency approved Tornado Cash and some Ethereum addresses.

To date, 45% of all Ethereum blocks are estimated to be OFAC compliant.

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Consumer adoption of bitcoin (BTC) and ether has accelerated after UnionBank, one of the largest universal banks in the Philippines, launched cryptocurrency trading in partnership with the Swiss company of Metaco cryptocurrencies.

“We are proud to continue UnionBank’s string of industry firsts, this time being the first regulated bank in the country to enable digital currency exchange functions for customers,” said Henry Aguda, UnionBank’s Director of Technology and Chief Transformation Officer.