As shown above, out of the lot, 82.77% of all relay blocks have been found to be built by Flashbots alone — contributing heavily to Ethereum centralization.
A related blog from BitMEX highlighted the need for a complete redevelopment of Flashbots or a similar system to mitigate unforeseen complications in an era after the Merge. However, Flashbots proponents argue that the system is a decentralized autonomous organization and will eventually become decentralized itself.
Complementing the data related to Flashbots’ dominance, an analysis from Santiment indicated that 46.15% of Ethereum’s PoS nodes are controlled by only two addresses. “Since the successful completion of the Merge, the majority of the blocks — somewhere around 40% or more — have been built by two addresses belonging to Lido and Coinbase. It isn’t ideal to see more than 40% of blocks being settled by two providers, particularly one that is a centralized service provider ,” explained Ryan Rasmussen, crypto research analyst at Bitwise.