2026-11-03 –, Lightning Stage
FOCIL strengthens censorship resistance by giving validators a path to force transaction inclusion, but it does not eliminate other sources of builder power. This talk maps what FOCIL fixes, what remains an off-protocol market-structure problem, and what that means as builders gain new capabilities.
FOCIL addresses one of the clearest risks of builder concentration: censorship. But inclusion is only one dimension of builder power. Builders can still differentiate through private order flow, latency, exclusive relationships, specialized compute, and increasingly, execution capabilities that applications may depend on.
This talk separates the problems FOCIL solves from the ones it deliberately leaves outside the protocol, and asks what happens to builder decentralization after inclusion is handled. Using programmable builder execution as a concrete example, I’ll examine which remaining risks are market-structure problems, which may need common interfaces or stronger portability, and where protocol intervention would create more harm than benefit.
Attendees will leave with a clearer framework for evaluating builder power in a post-FOCIL Ethereum.
Currently, Marissa is Head of Product at Eureka, the third largest block builder. Previously, she worked at the Ethereum Foundation, where she led product work across account abstraction and interoperability. She co-authored the Trustless Manifesto with Vitalik Buterin and Yoav Weiss, articulating a vision for systems built around minimized trust and stronger decentralization.