Fewer Than Half of New Ethereum Blocks Over the Past 24 Hours Are OFAC Compliant

After the U.S. government blacklisted Tornado Cash transactions for U.S. people in August, there was a swift response by validators on the Ethereum blockchain to exclude sanctioned transactions. For many in the crypto industry, such moves were decried as censorship – directly counter to the vision of a decentralized network free from government interference.

Now, however, the trend is going the other way, and more blocks with Tornado Cash are going through even if they’re non-OFAC compliant.

According to an MEV watchdog site, just 49% of blocks that made it onto the Ethereum blockchain over the past 24 hours were OFAC-compliant, meaning the blocks excluded transactions that have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

This is a significant decrease in censorship from Ethereum’s past. Ethereum hit an all-time high for censorship on Nov. 21, when 79% of blocks relayed on Ethereum excluded OFAC-sanctioned transactions. The last time that Ethereum’s censored blocks were below 50% was Oct.16.

Put another way, that means that more than half of the blocks that made it onto the Ethereum blockchain over the last 24 hours are non-OFAC compliant.

So what has reversed Ethereum’s censorship course?

Martin Köppelmann, a censorship-resistance advocate and the co-founder of Gnosis Chain, which also runs a non-censoring relayer, shared in a tweet that the decline in censorship is partially thanks to BloXroute, Ultrasound and Gnosis since they make up most of the uncensored block space.

Köppelmann told CoinDesk that he believes this “is good news and I am happy Gnosis is contributing, but I also believe Ethereum censorship resistance should not depend on so few entities.”

Read more: Is Ethereum’s Censorship Problem Taking a Turn?