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Blockchain

Why does my pending transaction expose its full intent to builders before it is included?

85

Opportunity

FOCIL (EIP-7805) targets censorship of which transactions get included and is slated for the Hegota upgrade in late 2026. It does nothing to hide transaction content from builders before a block is finalized. Builders can still read every pending transaction in clear text and extract value through sandwiching or discriminatory ordering before inclusion. The encrypted mempool proposal LUCID is the intended complement but remains in active design: threshold decryption requires a committee to reconstruct secrets, and the protocol aborts or stalls if a threshold of committee members goes offline. Until that design is finalized and deployed at scale, FOCIL and ePBS together prevent censorship at the inclusion layer while leaving pre-inclusion extraction structurally untouched.

Why it matters

Transaction content privacy before inclusion is the missing piece that prevents builders from using ordering power to extract value from users regardless of which inclusion or auction mechanism is in place.

How I score the opportunity

The Opportunity Score is my own read, not a measurement: how much it hurts, how often it bites, and how little exists to solve it today. Higher means I think it is more worth building.

Severity8/10

How much pain it causes when it shows up.

Frequency9/10

How often people actually run into it.

Whitespace9/10

How little good tooling exists for it today.

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