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arXiv · 2505.13751

Multiple Proposer Transaction Fee Mechanism Design: Robust Incentives Against Censorship and Bribery

Aikaterini-Panagiota Stouka·Julian Ma·Thomas Thiery
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Abstract

Transaction Fee Mechanism (TFM) design in blockchain protocols has gained significant attention following the pioneering work of Roughgarden [EC' 21], which established a formal framework for analyzing user and block proposer incentives under various Transaction Fee Mechanisms, including Ethereum's current fee mechanism EIP-1559. However, the original TFM framework and follow-up TFM works overlook the critical challenge of censorship resistance-specifically in the presence of an external malicious actor who is willing to bribe the proposer to censor a transaction. In this paper, we extend the Roughgarden's framework to capture censorship resistance under bribery attacks via a Bayesian game, where a strategic block proposer's "type" is determined by a bribe function from an external malicious actor. Under this framework, the definition of a standard TFM is extended to a bribery-aware TFM. This technique is broadly applicable to analyze censorship resistance under bribery attacks of both single and multiple proposer protocols within the original TFM scope. We choose to utilize it to evaluate the incentive compatibility and censorship resistance of several TFMs within the context of a multiple proposer protocol called Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL). FOCIL represents a critical evolution in the Ethereum roadmap, serving as the consensus and censorship resistance flagship for the upcoming Hegota hard fork. It aims to bolster Ethereum's censorship resistance by enabling multiple proposers to contribute to block construction. While recent works such as Garimidi et al.[FC' 25] have extended the TFM framework to multiple proposer settings, they do not aim to capture censorship under bribery attacks and they are not compatible with the unique hierarchical structure of FOCIL.

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Aikaterini-Panagiota Stouka, Julian Ma, Thomas Thiery. 2025-05-19. Multiple Proposer Transaction Fee Mechanism Design: Robust Incentives Against Censorship and Bribery. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13751

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