What is transaction censorship?
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 4 min
In short
Transaction censorship is when whoever builds a block deliberately leaves certain transactions out. Excluding specific addresses for compliance reasons does happen in practice, and affected transactions can take longer to confirm. Knowing that this mechanism exists helps you interpret a delay correctly.
Key points
- A block producer deliberately omitting certain transactions
- Compliance-driven exclusion happens in practice
- Another producer may still include the transaction later
- Users experience it as a delay in confirmation
Definition
The deliberate omission of particular transactions from a block by whoever produces or builds it, irrespective of the fee offered. Policies vary by operator, and the fate of excluded transactions is not uniform.
What goes into a block is the producer's choice. Normally they take the highest-fee transactions first, but they are equally free not to. Where an operator has a policy of excluding transactions involving certain addresses, those transactions do not appear in the blocks that operator produces.
On Ethereum, the role of assembling a block's contents is separated out and several builders compete for it. Public statistics show that some of them apply filters based on sanctions lists. Affected transactions have consequently been observed to take longer to confirm.
Not every producer follows the same policy, though. When a builder that applies no such filter gets its turn, the transaction is included. The observed behaviour is therefore not a hard stop but a lengthening of the time to confirmation.
Watch out for
- · This article describes what happens; it neither argues a position nor offers workarounds
- · Delays have many other causes, including congestion and a low fee setting
- · Operator policies change, so check current public statistics rather than assuming