FOCIL is scheduled for Hegota. Including transactions on Ethereum becomes a protocol rule.

FOCIL is the kind of groundbreaking censorship resistance innovation you'd expect to see in a new chain with nothing to lose and everything to prove, not the world's most established smart contract platform. Ethereum's developers have scheduled it for the Hegotá upgrade (EIP-8081), which doesn't have a confirmed date yet.

Today, whether a valid transaction gets into a block depends on whoever builds that block, and most validators sell the right to build their blocks to specialized builders. This has resulted in a few builders dominating block production and the authors of EIP-7805 argue that this has weakened Ethereum's censorship resistance.

Ethereum came through the 2022 US sanctions on Tornado Cash without becoming a censored chain because enough block producers kept including those transactions, but nothing in the protocol required them to do so.

The upgrade makes that a protocol rule by having 16 validators publish, for every block, a list of the transactions they have seen waiting to get in. The block then has to contain the valid transactions from those lists whenever it has room for them, and validators won't vote for a block that leaves them out, so that block can't become part of the chain.

A single list is enough to force a transaction in, so censoring it would require every one of the 16 validators chosen for each block to leave it off their lists, block after block, on top of the builder. Builders still choose everything else in the block and where the listed transactions go, so Ethereum keeps the efficiency of specialized block building without letting builders decide who gets in.

The rule protects L2 users too, since an L2 that lets users force a transaction through Ethereum when its operator ignores them only works if Ethereum itself includes that transaction.

I think this is the right way to protect censorship resistance, because a rule that every validator enforces doesn't depend on the policy of any one company, or on how that company responds to legal or commercial pressure.

Ethereum is the foundation of most of the crypto economy, so I expect this change to go a long way in locking in censorship resistance as a core property of the future institutions that use Ethereum as their consensus computer, though it won't make Ethereum censorship-proof or guarantee that those institutions stay neutral.