BloXrout refuses to transact with OFAC blacklisted addresses.
BloXrout, a blockchain infrastructure company that provides DeFi tools, said its relays would begin rejecting transactions containing addresses on the US sanctions list.
“Effective immediately: all bloXroute relays will reject a block bid if it contains an OFAC transaction (Tx interacting with an address that appears in the OFAC SDN list).” bloXroute wrote Monday of X. The change is not expected to have “an impact” on the network “other than reducing our own odds of winning.”
bloXroute’s transaction censorship has no effect. Ethereum 
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The company said it was “unstoppable, permissionless and fragile”. “Because they are decentralized, globally distributed, and not easily influenced by any single entity, even with the best networking technology.”
The announcement received some criticism from X critics. “It’s either ‘commit to supporting ETH’ or ‘maintain compliance.’ You can’t have both.” A user named Egor Egorov said: reply. “Are you self-censoring, or is the state coming knocking?” asked User Marius Kjærstad.
approved address
Other major cryptocurrency players have demonstrated compliance with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Control requirements not to facilitate transactions to anyone on the sanctions list.
Tether, the centralized issuer of the largest stablecoin USDT, recently announced. freezing All cryptocurrency addresses on OFAC’s list. After a few weeks the company said For the FBI, “we’ve put the U.S. Secret Service on our platform and we’re working on doing the same.”
There have also been attempts to censor transactions on the decentralized Bitcoin. In 2021, US mining company Marathon said it would not include transactions with OFAC blacklisted addresses in its blocks, but immediately withdrawn movement. Last November, a researcher notice F2Pool mining pool rejected some of these transactions.
Lead developer at blockchain explorer Blockchair Nikita Zhavoronkov wrote that he sees bloXroute’s announcement as another sign of a larger trend.
“Although bloXroute is neither a miner nor a validator, this is the first case where it rejects an entire block containing approved addresses. Previous cases were all about not including transactions in the block template.” wrote X added that if enough validators follow this trend, it could lead to a kind of “51% attack” on Bitcoin and Ethereum.
“With the emergence of ETFs and BlackRock, Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly compliant and KYC-compliant, so we can expect more pools following the ‘rules,’” Zhavoronkov said.
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