Ethereum narrows 66 proposals for Hegotá upgrade

Core Ethereum developers and protocol contributors are reviewing 66 proposals to narrow the feature set for the next major upgrade, Hegotá, which is targeted for release next year. Fork-choice enforced inclusion lists (FOCIL) is the only EIP formally scheduled so far, while several privacy-focused proposals are being discussed for inclusion.

The review is part of scoping work to decide which changes will ship in Hegotá. FOCIL would allow a committee of validators to force pending transactions into blocks with the aim of improving censorship resistance. The other proposals under consideration include Frame Transactions (EIP-8141), Keyed Nonces (EIP-8250) and Recent Roots for Frame Transactions (EIP-8272). Those EIPs would provide protocol primitives that could be used by privacy-preserving applications.

Ethereum Foundation contributor Toni Wahrstätter wrote on X that the three EIPs would “unlock native privacy, allowing privacy apps to work without having to rely on intermediaries.”

An Ethereum developer call is scheduled for Monday at 14:00 UTC. Participants expect to further narrow the list of candidate EIPs during that meeting. Core developers plan to finalize which proposals will be included in Hegotá; proposals that are not selected can be reconsidered for later upgrades.

FOCIL is intended to strengthen the network’s resistance to transaction censorship by giving a validator committee a mechanism to ensure specific pending transactions are included in blocks. The Frame Transactions proposal changes how transactions are represented and validated to support off-chain framing and privacy features. Keyed Nonces and Recent Roots are designed to provide deterministic inputs and state references that privacy-preserving constructs require.

Before Hegotá, developers plan to ship the Glamsterdam upgrade, which the public roadmap lists as improving scalability, hardening layer 1 and improving usability. Glamsterdam’s mainnet launch is expected in the second half of 2026 and its rollout will precede work on Hegotá.

During scoping, developers will review proposals for compatibility with the protocol, implementation complexity, security implications and the readiness of reference implementations and audits. Validator operators and client teams are assessing operational and consensus risks for each candidate EIP, including how FOCIL’s forced-inclusion mechanism would function in practice.

Developer teams and projects building privacy tools are monitoring the scoping process because accepted protocol primitives could reduce reliance on external relays and mixers. The upcoming core developer discussions will determine which technical changes move forward in the 2027 development cycle.