Fee market auctions can reduce some practical censorship pressure by changing economic incentives, but they do not eliminate censorship risk and can introduce new vectors for exclusion.
How auctions change incentives
Fee market auctions reward block producers or block builders for including transactions that pay higher fees. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation has described fee mechanisms as aligning incentives so that rational proposers include high-fee transactions first. When inclusion is driven by price, a user under censorship can theoretically outbid a censor and regain inclusion. That economic backstop makes low-level, non-coordinated censorship harder because it becomes costly for a miner or builder to ignore paying transactions.New risks: privatization and builder concentration
At the same time, mechanisms that centralize ordering—such as private block-building auctions—can increase risk. Phil Daian, Flashbots and colleagues have documented how MEV-focused private markets and proposer-builder separation create concentrated intermediaries that can filter transactions before they reach the proposer. In practice, private relays and single dominant builders can accept payments in exchange for excluding transactions, or comply with legal demands, producing a different form of censorship risk even when on-chain inclusion is governed by an auction.Causation matters: auctions change who sets the marginal cost of inclusion. When many independent producers compete, auction pricing tends to protect inclusion. When a small set of builders controls transaction selection, auctions can be opaque and enable filtering. The result is not purely technical: it is shaped by market structure, legal jurisdiction, and corporate governance. Miners or builders operating under state pressure may voluntarily censor despite high fees to avoid legal consequences, and large exchanges or custodians may coordinate off-chain to keep particular transactions out of markets.
Consequences extend beyond transaction delays. Censorship undermines financial access for dissidents, remittances, or community projects in affected territories, and it can accelerate centralization as users migrate toward trusted private channels. Conversely, transparent, open fee markets combined with diverse, geographically distributed producers and publicly auditable builder behavior reduce risk.
In sum, fee market auctions are a useful tool to mitigate incidental censorship by raising the economic cost of exclusion, but they are not a panacea. Broader defenses—diversified infrastructure, transparent builder practices, regulatory safeguards, and community governance—are necessary to address coordinated or legally induced censorship that market mechanisms alone cannot prevent.