Morning Minute: Ethereum's Next Upgrade Features Censorship Resistance

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors fall another 4%; BTC at 63k
• ZachXBT teases major expose of a top revenue crypto protocol for inside trading
• Terraforms Labs sues Jane Street for driving the Luna collapse
• WLFI claims a coordinated attack led to USD1 briefly depegging
• Crypto dot com receives conditional approval from OCC for bank charter

🔹 Ethereum Is Hardcoding Censorship Resistance Into the Protocol

The latest Ethereum upgrade has been announced, with a very interesting core focus.

📌 What Happened

Ethereum developers confirmed FOCIL (Fork-Choice-Enforced Inclusion Lists as EIP-7805) for the Hegota network upgrade, targeted for H2 2026.

The decision came at the Feb 19 All Core Devs call, backed by Vitalik Buterin.

It works like this: every block, 17 validators are randomly selected to submit inclusion lists of valid transactions they’ve seen and block producers must include those transactions or risk their block getting rejected by the network. Thus no single validator controls the list and no single validator can censor it.

FOCIL ships alongside EIP-8141, which makes smart contract wallets, multisigs, quantum-resistant wallets, and privacy tools a core part of Ethereum.

🗣️ What They’re Saying

Vitalik Buterin called FOCIL the foundation of a “cypherpunk principled non-ugly Ethereum,” describing it as a return to the original ethos of the network.

“ETH devs, I love you. You mean well. But when you create an EIP to solve the problem of ‘filtering out transactions with sanctioned addresses’ and your solution is ‘to allow validators to impose constraints on builders by force-including transactions in their blocks’… we have a problem, a big problem. And if you don’t see it, you’re either being naive or reckless.” -Developer Ameen Soleimani, on X

🧠 Why It Matters

Censorship resistance sounds like a niche concern until you realize what it actually means.

No validator, no government, no exchange, and no pressure campaign can decide which transactions get processed on Ethereum. Your transaction either meets the protocol rules or it doesn’t.

That matters for the average person more than it might seem.

The financial system you use today can freeze your assets, block payments to certain countries, flag your account for reasons you’ll never fully understand, and reverse transactions after the fact. Banks do it. PayPal does it. Visa does it. They follow rules and manage risk. The result is a system where access to your money depends on staying in someone else’s good graces.

And conceptually, blockchains can succumb to that same system (via centralization, technical design, etc.).

Ethereum with FOCIL works differently. Once a transaction hits the mempool and meets the rules, the network has to process it. Privacy tools, cross-border transfers, and wallets the government has flagged all get the same treatment as any other valid transaction.

It’s a net positive for a global, decentralized, permissionless payments system.

But it likely will have some compliance impact down the line.

For example, someone in the U.S. cannot legally send money to someone in Iran. Banks would block that transaction. Ethereum will not—it will process it. By design.

But that leaves compliance up to the user (or perhaps the protocol). And the U.S. government probably won’t like that.

Expect this to be a discussion item in crypto discussions to come…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are red again down anoter 4%; BTC -5% at $62.7K; ETH -6% at $1,810; SOL -5% at $77
• DCR (+7%) and JST (+1%) led top movers
• ZachXBT teased a major investigation dropping on Thursday which will expose a top crypto protocol for inside trading
• Terraform Labs’ bankruptcy administrator sued Jane Street, alleging the firm used a secret insider chat with a former Terraform intern to front-run the UST collapse, withdrawing 85M UST from Curve just minutes after Terraform pulled 150M
• World Liberty Financial claimed a “coordinated attack” after USD1 briefly depegged to $0.98 on Binance citing hacked X accounts, disinformation, and short-selling (WLFI dropped 7%)
• Crypto.com received conditional OCC approval for a national trust bank charter, joining Circle, Ripple, Paxos, and Bridge; Coinbase and WLF still pending
• Vitalik Buterin sold 3,100+ ETH via CoW Swap to fund Ethereum Foundation initiatives
• Missouri lawmakers revived a Bitcoin strategic reserve bill with updated language addressing concerns that killed the prior version
• Austria ordered KuCoin EU to freeze operations over compliance staffing shortfalls
• Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas encouraged buying Bitcoin on dips as BTC trades well off its highs

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

• Strategy made its 100th Bitcoin purchase, $39.8M and its smallest buy of 2026, now holding 717,722 BTC at a $6.8B unrealized loss
• Tom Lee’s BitMine bought more ETH as ETH sank to a 2-week low, now owning 3.66% of the supply and holding $691M in cash
• ProCap (Anthony Pompliano’s Bitcoin treasury firm) repurchased 148,241 shares of BRR with its market cap well below its BTC holdings’ value; Pompliano plans to keep buying at a discount to NAV

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme majors were very red; DOGE -6%, SHIB -5%, PEPE -6%, TRUMP -4%, PENGU -5%, SPX -5%, FARTCOIN -9%
• WhiteWhale (+16%) led notable movers; CLUDE (+50x) and MOSS (+31x) led new movers

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• The Backpack exchange plans to introduce a token allowing users to earn equity through staking with 20% of their equity up for grabs
• Based One announced an $11.5M raise led by Pantera to build a crypto super app
• USDai’s CHIP ICO token sale officially went live, with CHIP priced at $300M fdv
• OpenClaw creator banned all crypto references on the AI agent project’s Discord server, citing concerns about speculation culture overtaking development

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly red with Punks leading; Punks +3% at 29.9 ETH, Pudgy -2% at 4.47 ETH, BAYC -2% at 6 ETH; Hypurr’s -7% at 459 HYPE
• Ringers (+10%) led top movers