BloXroute To Reject All OFAC-listed Transactions, Sparks Censorship Debate
BloXroute, a blockchain infrastructure company offering DeFi tools, has announced that its relays will begin declining transactions that include addresses listed under U.S. sanctions.
“Effective immediately, all bloXroute relays will reject block bids if they contain OFAC transactions (Tx which interact with addresses appearing on the OFAC SDN list),” bloXroute wrote Monday on X. “We look forward to seeing this having no effect except reducing our own win-rate.”
BloXroute asserted that its implementation of transaction censorship should not impact Ethereum’s fundamental characteristics of being “unstoppable, permissionless, and anti-fragile.”
“Because it’s [Ethereum] decentralized and globally distributed, and not easily affected by any single entity, even if it has the best networking tech,” the company noted.
The announcement did not go down well with many in the crypto community, with bloXroute facing criticism from some commentators on X.
One user named Egor Egorov expressed skepticism, stating, “It’s either ‘committed to supporting ETH’ or ‘maintaining compliance.’ Can’t have both.” Another user, Marius Kjærstad, questioned whether the decision to reject certain transactions was a result of self-censorship or external pressure from regulatory authorities, asking, “Are you self-censoring or did the state come knocking?”
Nikita Zhavoronkov, lead developer of the blockchain explorer Blockchair, views bloXroute’s announcement as indicative of a broader trend.
“While bloXroute is neither a miner nor a validator, this is the first case of someone rejecting whole blocks containing sanctioned addresses,” Zhavoronkov wrote on X. “Previous cases were all about not including transactions into block templates.”
Zhavoronkov cautioned
Read more on cryptonews.com
