Censorship Resistance

Censorship resistance refers to a blockchain network's ability to guarantee that any valid transaction will eventually be included and finalized, even if certain block producers, validators, or other powerful participants would prefer to exclude it — for example, a transaction interacting with a sanctioned address, or one that's simply inconvenient for a dominant block producer to include. It's generally achieved through a combination of a sufficiently large and diverse set of independent block producers and protocol-level mechanisms that let users force inclusion if the current producer refuses.

Censorship resistance is closely tied to decentralization metrics like the Nakamoto Coefficient (see Kaavon's "Nakamoto Coefficient" glossary definition): a network where block production is concentrated among very few entities, including a sequencer in many Layer 2 systems (see Kaavon's "Sequencer" and "Shared Sequencer" glossary definitions), is more exposed to censorship risk than one with many independent, interchangeable producers. Many rollups address this specifically with a "forced inclusion" mechanism letting users submit transactions directly to the base layer if the sequencer won't include them.