Ethereum transactions frozen for 12 seconds
A recently organized team of researchers, the Special Mechanisms Group (SMG), demonstrated Thursday how to take advantage of a facet of the proposer-builder separation market to force through an Ethereum block containing just one transaction : theirs. Proposer-builder separation (PBS) is intended to increase censorship-resistance by separating the roles of block builders and block proposers in the more-or-less unceasing Ethereum blockchain. But the group found a way to use the feature to make a very public point. Loading Tweet.. The block’s lone transaction embedded a URL to a presentation and research paper on SMG’s website, describing the problem and proposing potential ways to address it. Reactions were decidedly mixed. Ryan Berckmans, a former software engineer at Augur, was among many who pointed out that Ethereum’s gas fee market would make it difficult to delay transactions using this method for long, but noted it did reveal certain problems in the way some applicati...