On transaction inclusion

[ilblackdragon]

Context

One of the critical requirements for the decentralized system is censorship resistance.

Censorship becomes hard in limit as networks scale and block production becomes professionalized and in turn more centralized.

One prominent example, is Ethereum where there is only few block proposers that then communicate to validators already prepared blocks (so called Proposer-Builder separation).

NEAR has been addressing this by having multiple shards producing parts of the block in parallel avoiding a lot of centralization and MEV issues and low block time meaning there is not much room of block construction outsourcing.

One still can imagine that chunk producers across multiple shards can outsource their work by delegating the signing authority (for example via TEE + MPC construction that NEAR is enabling) to another entity which actually constructs and propagates the parts of block on behalf of assigned producers. This would lead to highly centralized system similar to ones that emerged in Ethereum and open up to centralization.

The emergence of low requirement stateless validators on NEAR provides us with an alternative. Already a stateless validator can be run on a $27/mo node or a personal computer making it highly accessible.

Proposal

Proposal to allow stateless validators to include transactions into the upcoming block as part of their approval. This allows to ensure that anyone who participates in the consensus is able to include transactions.

This requires additional cost as it will take more bytes for the consensus so it's more akin Forced Inclusion and should be treated as a way to avoid censorship by professionalized chunk production process.

[frol]

Proposal to allow stateless validators to include transactions into the upcoming block as part of their approval.

I don't understand how this solves the original problem. How will it help against being sold/abused/censored? How is it different from creating a regular transaction and submitting it over P2P to other nodes?

[ilblackdragon]

Proposal to allow stateless validators to include transactions into the upcoming block as part of their approval.

I don't understand how this solves the original problem. How will it help against being sold/abused/censored? How is it different from creating a regular transaction and submitting it over P2P to other nodes?

When you submit P2P transaction it still needs to be included into a chunk by the chunk producer. In case NEAR suffers similar offchain incentivized concentration of block production that Ethereum has (only 3 entities construct most of the blocks) - submitting into p2p doesn’t guarantee inclusion in any way.

Ability to force inclusion as part of the consensus messages / fork choice rule allows to bypass censoring of block producers.

For those who are not familiar with centralization forces - effectively someone can come right now to chunk producers and offer them $X to delegate their signing ability so a single party can produce chunks across multiple shards. This is economically effective if there is enough value extracted from reordering transactions.

Ethereum is an example where this has happened off protocol via MEV boost.

NEAR is a lot more complex to do this due to low block times, sharding and the way signatures on chunk production is done. TEE delegation can actually make this feasible. Or a protocol change to delegate chunk production for a reward.

Alternatively to this proposal can focus on multi leader stateless chunk production, removing possibility for such centralization more fundamentally.