# Besu Hegota Position Paper

**The Besu team supports LUCID as the execution layer headliner for Hegota.**

> "Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself. Without it, everything else, efficiency, UX, scalability, is decoration on a fragile core."

[The Trustless Manifesto](https://trustlessness.eth.limo/general/2025/11/11/the-trustless-manifesto.html) (Buterin, Weiss, Posner)

Glamsterdam will deliver ePBS and Block Access Lists, delivering on our commitment to scaling. But scaling without censorship resistance and trustlessness is scaling on a fragile core. Hegota should strenghten the core by shipping LUCID alongside FOCIL.

Today, users who want protection from front-running and sandwich attacks must trust a centralised intermediary with their plaintext transactions. As that trust grows, so does centralisation: the mempool starves, builders consolidate power, and Ethereum drifts from its founding principles. Centralised builders control over 90% of blocks, with a single builder controlling roughly half of that market. Non-MEV-participating proposers routinely cannot fill blocks to target gas.

LUCID eliminates this trust requirement at the protocol level. No intermediaries, no private channels, no trust assumptions beyond an honest majority of attesters. The design limits abuse through fee forfeiture: if a decryptor withholds the key, the sealed transaction does not execute but the sender's fees are still burned, making it costly to selectively suppress transactions.

## FOCIL Without LUCID Is Incomplete

FOCIL forces transaction inclusion regardless of builder preference, but cannot protect transactions subject to MEV extraction. Without LUCID, FOCIL's utility is limited to non-time-sensitive transactions with no MEV exposure. Any transaction where ordering matters, which is most DeFi activity, cannot safely enter the public mempool for FOCIL includers to pick up.

FOCIL relies on home stakers and small validators as includers, the decentralised base that gives inclusion lists their credibility. Censorship resistance is only as strong as the independence of the actors enforcing it. But includers can only include what they can see. As long as valuable transactions flow through private channels, FOCIL includers have almost nothing to work with. LUCID gives those transactions a trustless path back to the public mempool by making front-running protection free at the protocol level. FOCIL's inclusion guarantees then apply to the full breadth of Ethereum activity, not just the MEV-free fraction.

## The Fusaka Incident

The Prysm bug following the Fusaka upgrade stress-tested what happens when the MEV supply chain fails. Circuit breakers forced fallback to local sequencing. The network continued to operate normally and client diversity prevented a finality failure. Local block building remains Ethereum's critical safety net.

[Flashbots Research documented](https://collective.flashbots.net/t/how-the-mev-supply-chain-reacts-to-circuit-breakers/5439) that MetaMask Swaps routes over 99% of user transactions through private mempools. During the outage, those transactions were re-routed publicly and sandwich attacks dropped sharply, not because of protocol protection, but because builders had been cut off. This was only short-term stable: had the outage persisted much longer, searchers would have reverted to priority gas auctions and toxic MEV would have returned.

LUCID makes this protection permanent. Encrypted transactions are shielded from front-running regardless of whether PBS is active. The public mempool is Ethereum's fallback when the MEV supply chain fails. If that fallback is starved of transactions, the network's ability to gracefully degrade is compromised. LUCID gives users a reason to return.

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We recognise the strong case for Frame Transactions (EIP-8141) and the synergy with FOCIL that Vitalik has highlighted. But order flow centralisation and mempool starvation are structural problems that worsen each upgrade cycle. We support Frame Transactions for a future hardfork.

Never skip core day.

\- The Besu Team