Vitalik: FOCIL and EIP-8141 collaboration can achieve censorship-resistant fast onboarding

PANews February 20 News, Vitalik Buterin posted on X platform that there is significant synergy between the FOCIL mechanism and the account abstraction proposal Ethereum’s EIP-8141 (based on 7701). EIP-8141 elevates smart accounts (including multisig, quantum-resistant signatures, key changes, gas sponsorship, etc.) to “first-class citizens,” meaning operations from these accounts can be directly packaged as on-chain transactions without additional wrapping. Additionally, privacy protocols can also implement multi-tenant account modes via paymaster or 2D nonce mechanisms, thereby receiving native support at the same level.

FOCIL provides a censorship-resistant fast transaction inclusion mechanism. When combined, various transactions—including smart wallet transactions, gas sponsorship transactions, and privacy protocol transactions—can be included in blocks through one of 17 roles (proposers or inclusers) randomly selected each slot. Vitalik stated that this design can ensure transactions are almost certainly confirmed on-chain within 1–2 slots in adversarial environments.

In the current version, each FOCIL is approximately 8 KB in size, relatively small, but future expansion paths exist to support most transactions in a block entering via FOCIL channels. This architecture is similar in features to the Multi- proposer Chain Protocol (MCP) design, but unlike MCP, FOCIL does not control the “last look” related to MEV; this role is still allocated through the ePBS auction mechanism.

Vitalik emphasized that even if 100% of block slots are monopolized by adversaries through the proposer-builder separation (PBS) mechanism, refusing to connect to public mempools or discriminate against specific applications, FOCIL can still ensure all transactions are quickly included. While this design does not eliminate the centralization risk of proposers, it significantly weakens their power.

Under the EIP-8141 framework, transactions from smart wallets or privacy protocols can be directly received by FOCIL inclusers via the public mempool, without additional intermediaries or wrapping processes. Vitalik summarized that Ethereum is accelerating core architecture upgrades.