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arXiv · 2606.01874

The Price of Decentralization in Block Building

Burak Öz·Fei Wu·Luis Correia·Sen Yang·Bruno Mazorra·Stefanos Leonardos
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Abstract

Decentralized block building mechanisms replace the monopoly of a single proposer with multiple builders. However, their censorship-resistance and fair-access benefits depend not only on the number of builders, but also on where builders are geographically positioned to provide transaction coverage. We study this tension between builder location choice, user transaction coverage, and utility concentration by modeling decentralized block building as a stochastic coverage game. Builders choose regions, information sources emit transactions over a block construction round, and latency determines whether a transaction is received before the deadline. We show that the game is an exact potential game and admits a pure Nash equilibrium. We prove an asymptotically tight factor-2 bound on the Price of Anarchy, which we interpret as the price of decentralization from uncoordinated builder placement. We also study builder utility concentration, showing that the lowest-utility builder earns at least half of the highest-utility builder's payoff, and the utility-share HHI is at most 12.5% above the egalitarian benchmark. We complement the theory with simulations under richer latency and source environments and show that slot times, builder participation, and reward-sharing rules are important protocol design choices that can shape the price of decentralization.

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Burak Öz, Fei Wu, Luis Correia, Sen Yang, Bruno Mazorra, Stefanos Leonardos. 2026-06-01. The Price of Decentralization in Block Building. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01874

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