Ethereum plans Hegota hard fork as scalability roadmap extends into 2026

The Hegota upgrade will follow Glamsterdam, a planned hard fork expected in the first half of 2026, and is designed to tackle longer-term architectural issues such as state growth and node participation barriers that have emerged as the Ethereum ecosystem has expanded.

Ethereum’s core developers agreed on the name “Hegota” during late-2025 protocol calls and formalized its place in the twice-annual upgrade cadence, reflecting a shift toward more predictable, incremental improvements rather than large, infrequent changes. The name blends references to the execution layer (“Bogota”) and the consensus layer (“Heze”), signaling a combined scope of enhancements across Ethereum’s core architecture.

The precise set of technical features that Hegota will implement has not yet been finalized. Developers plan to begin the process of selecting the “headliner” Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for Hegota in early 2026, with discussions and decisions expected through the first quarter of the year.

Among the proposals under active consideration are Verkle trees, a new data structure intended to reduce the size and complexity of Ethereum’s state storage, and state or history expiry mechanisms that could prune inactive data. Both initiatives aim to alleviate the growing burden on full-node operators, potentially lowering the hardware requirements for participating in the network and supporting broader decentralization.

Hegota follows on from the Glamsterdam hard fork, which is scheduled for the early part of 2026 and is expected to introduce efficiency improvements such as enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists to optimize gas usage and execution performance. Once Glamsterdam completes, focus will shift fully to the planning and technical finalization of Hegota’s scope later in the year.

The scheduling of Hegota as part of a structured development timeline underscores Ethereum’s efforts to handle network demands amid growing decentralized finance, NFT and general transaction activity, which have increased pressure on Ethereum’s data storage and execution layers over time.

Ethereum’s upgrade process has shifted toward a biannual cadence to keep pace with ecosystem growth and to reduce the complexity of individual hard forks by splitting functionality across releases, enabling more continuous improvements to scalability and decentralization.