FOCIL Solves Censorship. What Doesn't It Solve About Builders?

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Speaker: Marissa Posner

Type: Lightning Talk

Expertise: Deep prior knowledge

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

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.