Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.
GM!
Today’s top news:
Crypto majors fall another 4%; BTC at 63k
ZachXBT teases major expose of a top revenue crypto protocol for inside trading
Terraforms Labs sues Jane Street for driving the Luna collapse
WLFI claims a coordinated attack led to USD1 briefly depegging
Crypto dot com receives conditional approval from OCC for bank charter
The latest Ethereum upgrade has been announced, with a very interesting core focus.
Ethereum developers confirmed FOCIL (Fork-Choice-Enforced Inclusion Lists as EIP-7805) for the Hegota network upgrade, targeted for H2 2026.
The decision came at the Feb 19 All Core Devs call, backed by Vitalik Buterin.
It works like this: every block, 17 validators are randomly selected to submit inclusion lists of valid transactions they’ve seen and block producers must include those transactions or risk their block getting rejected by the network. Thus no single validator controls the list and no single validator can censor it.
FOCIL ships alongside EIP-8141, which makes smart contract wallets, multisigs, quantum-resistant wallets, and privacy tools a core part of Ethereum.
‘Ethereum Is Going Hard’: Vitalik Buterin Backs Censorship Resistance Upgrade
Vitalik Buterin called FOCIL the foundation of a “cypherpunk principled non-ugly Ethereum,” describing it as a return to the original ethos of the network.
“ETH devs, I love you. You mean well. But when you create an EIP to solve the problem of ‘filtering out transactions with sanctioned addresses’ and your solution is ‘to allow validators to impose constraints on builders by force-including transactions in their blocks’… we have a problem, a big problem. And if you don’t see it, you’re either being naive or reckless.” -Developer Ameen Soleimani, on X
Censorship resistance sounds like a niche concern until you realize what it actually means.
No validator, no government, no exchange, and no pressure campaign can decide which transactions get processed on Ethereum. Your transaction either meets the protocol rules or it doesn’t.
That matters for the average person more than it might seem.
The financial system you use today can freeze your assets, block payments to certain countries, flag your account for reasons you’ll never fully understand, and reverse transactions after the fact. Banks do it. PayPal does it. Visa does it. They follow rules and manage risk. The result is a system where access to your money depends on staying in someone else’s good graces.
