TLDR
Vitalik Buterin is warning that many Ethereum smart wallets and privacy tools rely on centralized relays, creating censorship and reliability risks when sending transactions.
- The risk comes from relay dependence, where smart contract wallets and privacy protocols need third party relays just to get transactions into a block.
- This dependence creates a censorship chokepoint and reliability risk that goes against Ethereums goal of censorship resistance and self custody.
- Ethereums roadmap proposes FOCIL and new EIPs to remove relays from the critical path, with changes targeted for the Hegota upgrade in 2026.
Deep Dive
1. What Relay Dependence Means
Today, many smart contract wallets and privacy systems on Ethereum do not broadcast transactions directly to the public mempool. Instead, they send them to a specialized relay service that pays gas or bundles them before forwarding to block builders.
Vitalik highlighted this relay dependence as a structural vulnerability: if a relay goes offline or refuses a transaction, the user has no alternative path to inclusion, which is embarrassing for a censorship resistant network. Smart wallets and privacy protocols are most affected, not basic EOAs that submit transactions directly with their own gas.
If you use a smart wallet or privacy tool that relies on a relay, your ability to transact may depend on that relays uptime and policies.
2. Why It Is A Serious Risk
Relay operators become centralized chokepoints. They can censor particular users, protocols, or entire regions by quietly dropping transactions, and users often cannot easily tell if the issue is censorship or a technical outage.
This undermines Ethereums core priority of censorship resistance, which Vitalik has named as a top mission for the ecosystem going forward. It is especially acute for privacy systems, where users are often trying to avoid surveillance and may already face regulatory pressure.
The weakest link for many advanced wallets is not the cryptography, but a handful of intermediaries that sit between you and validators.
3. How Ethereum Plans To Fix It
Vitalik points to a bundle of upgrades, notably FOCIL (Fork choice Enforced Inclusion List) plus EIP-7701 and EIP-8141, scheduled for the Hegota hard fork around late 2026. FOCIL would assign includer validators per slot, forcing inclusion of valid transactions from the public mempool and making censorship structurally difficult in the proposed design.
EIP-7701 and related account abstraction work aim to give all wallets smart wallet features - like gas sponsorship and key rotation - without needing off chain relayers, while privacy focused access layer tools such as Kohaku target private balance queries and metadata reduction.
Over the next cycle, the plan is to move gas sponsorship and privacy from relay services into the core protocol and wallet stack, so you get smart features without new central points of control.
Conclusion
Vitaliks warning is less about an immediate exploit and more about a design flaw: powerful smart wallets and privacy tools currently depend on fragile, censorable relays. The Ethereum roadmap is now explicitly trying to replace these intermediaries with protocol level inclusion guarantees and native smart wallet features, so that advanced Ethereum usage lines up better with self custody and censorship resistance.
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