Glossary
Censorship Resistance
The property of a blockchain that prevents any single party from blocking valid transactions, so anyone can transact without needing permission from an intermediary.
Censorship resistance is the guarantee that a valid, well-formed transaction cannot be permanently kept out of the chain by any single actor. No miner, validator, or sequencer should be able to decide that a particular user — or a particular kind of payment — simply never settles. It is one of the core reasons a decentralized ledger is worth more than a database run by one company.
The property comes from having many independent block producers: if one of them drops your transaction, another can include it in the next block. It weakens when production concentrates, which is why issues like MEV, OFAC-compliant relays, and single-sequencer rollups draw scrutiny. Mechanisms such as force inclusion, inclusion lists, and encrypted mempools exist specifically to harden it.