According to Willy Woo, Ethereum’s DeFi applications are proving to be centralized, as this rising metric shows

Blockchain analyst Willy Woo tweeted that he believes Ethereum is already under the control of the U.S. government, claiming that dApps built on the second-largest blockchain are not decentralized at all and that transactions on Ethereum do not resist censorship.

In his tweet, Willy Woo included a screenshot of include.watch and stated that 69% of Ethereum blocks are already OFAC compliant (this is only three months after the Merge upgrade was introduced in September).

Is this right? Only 3 months after ETH goes PoS, 69% of blocks are OFAC compliant?

Meaning Ethereum is already under control by the US government.

This means all DeFi apps running on ETH are not decentralized finance. And transactions are not censorship resistant. pic.twitter.com/VqNWuTXepn

– Willy Woo (@woonomic) December 23, 2022

FOCA is the Office of Foreign Assets Controlthe entity that enforces U.S. economic sanctions. In October, the percentage of OFAC-compliant blocks suddenly increased from 9% to 51%. This compliance is related to the MEV-Boost relays, to which the production of ETH blocks is outsourced.

Ethereum blocks went from 9% OFAC compliant to 51% OFAC compliant in the past month, as mev boost (block outsourcing) takes market share. https://t.co/SYiVHPlTf4

– Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact) October 14, 2022

The crypto community has also expressed other concerns about Ethereum’s centralization. The first is that approximately 52% of Ethereum nodes are hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), a heavyweight infrastructure provider.

The second is that after Merge was implemented, only two entities controlled about 50% of the Ethereum network – Lido and Coinbase. This is where nearly 50% of all ETH put into play was held – 30.24% and 14.44%, respectively.

However, the good news is that Lido is a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), which allows anyone to join it to become part of the largest entity on Ethereum.