A Researchers Proposal to Decentralize Block Production and Combat MEV in Ethereum

An Ethereum researcher known as malik672 has proposed a block formation mechanism aimed at combating centralization and Miner Extractable Value (MEV) in the second largest cryptocurrency network.

The expert highlighted that as of February 2025, roughly 80% of blocks are being produced by only two entities:

«This undermines the decentralized ethos of Ethereum. MEV—value derived from reordering or censoring transactions—remains an issue due to the dominance of advanced participants in the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) ecosystem.»

The researcher put forward a mechanism called Decentralized Random Block Proposal, which allows all clients to participate in block creation, rather than just validators and designated builders in PBS.

Under this proposal, clients like Geth and Nethermind would employ a function similar to a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) used by validators to randomly select transactions from the local mempool. Following this, participants would simultaneously broadcast the assembled block to the validators, who would filter out invalid transactions and compute the hash.

The expert believes that by randomly selecting transactions, MEV manipulation at the block level would become impossible—there would be no way to predict which transactions make it into the set, nor influence their order.

Additionally, this mechanism is more resilient to DDoS attacks, as «spam» is evenly spread across the mempool, preventing any single node from being overwhelmed.

The researcher noted that while this proposed method is not as optimized for rollups as PBS, it «prioritizes fairness and complete democratization”:

“This is a compromise: impartiality versus L2 accuracy. It’s the best option for Ethereum, which values equality over efficiency. Those seeking scalability should consider PBS,” he stated.

It’s worth mentioning that at the end of February, the non-profit organization Ethereum Foundation established an independent group to safeguard the values of the network.