Censorship-Resistance and Compliance Behavior in the Ethereum Consensus Mechanism

This paper examines Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and the factors shaping compliance behavior through statistical analysis and anomaly detection. Although PoS was designed to uphold credible neutrality and decentralization, the results show diverse behavior among builders, relays, and validators, driven by their roles, incentives, and the system’s design. Features like proposer-builder separation (PBS) and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) enhance the capacity of builders and relays to influence transaction inclusion, while validators’ influence is mostly limited to their proposer tasks. The paper further shows that partial enforcement of sanctions is insufficient to eliminate sanctioned transactions from the network, which demonstrates the challenge of balancing regulatory compliance with decentralization. In the current state, there is an inherent tension within Ethereum’s consensus mechanism, where both credible neutrality and compliance seem compromised.