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Sixty-six proposals. One confirmed. Ethereum’s developers have a lot of cutting to do before the Hegotá upgrade goes live.
The Ethereum development community is currently sifting through all 66 submitted improvement proposals to figure out which ones actually make the cut for Hegotá, the next major protocol upgrade with a heavy focus on native privacy. Right now, the only confirmed inclusion is FOCIL — Fork-choice enforced inclusion lists — a mechanism that lets validator committees force pending transactions into blocks, making it much harder for any actor to censor specific activity on the network. Everything else is still on the table, still being argued over, still unclear. Among the candidates drawing real attention: Frame Transactions (EIP-8141), Keyed Nonces (EIP-8250), and Recent Roots for Frame Transactions (EIP-8272). Ethereum Foundation contributor Toni Wahrstätter flagged these three in a recent post, pointing to their potential as foundational protocol primitives — basically the plumbing that privacy applications need to run without leaning on third-party intermediaries.
That last part matters a lot.
Right now, most privacy-focused applications on Ethereum depend on external infrastructure to function. Relays, mixers, off-chain services — all of it introduces trust assumptions and points of failure. The proposals under consideration for Hegotá would, if accepted, let privacy apps operate more directly at the protocol level. No middlemen. No extra trust. That’s a pretty significant shift from how things work today, and it’s probably why developers are treating this upgrade as a critical milestone rather than just another incremental release.
Monday’s Developer Call Is the Next Big Moment
Ethereum core developers are set to dig deeper into the proposals on Monday at 2:00 pm UTC. That call is basically where the real sorting begins — which ideas survive, which ones get shelved, and which ones get pushed to a future upgrade cycle. Proposals that don’t make Hegotá won’t necessarily die. Developers have been clear that valuable work can carry over into later updates, so teams behind rejected EIPs aren’t necessarily wasting their time. But getting into Hegotá matters for timing, and timing matters for the broader roadmap.
The upgrade itself is expected next year. No hard date yet, but that general window gives developers a rough deadline to work backward from. Sixty-six proposals is a lot. Narrowing that down to a coherent, implementable set without breaking anything else in the process is genuinely hard work, and the Monday call is one of the first real checkpoints.
Glamsterdam Is Coming Too — Probably Late 2026
Parallel to all of this, developers are also preparing Glamsterdam, a separate major upgrade targeting network scalability, layer-1 security improvements, and general user-friendliness. The public roadmap puts Glamsterdam’s mainnet launch somewhere in the latter half of 2026. So Ethereum’s core teams are basically running two significant upgrade tracks at once — Glamsterdam for near-term scalability and usability gains, Hegotá for longer-term privacy infrastructure.
That’s a lot to juggle. And it’s worth being honest that managing two concurrent upgrade cycles introduces coordination risk. Developers have to keep both timelines from colliding, make sure changes in one don’t create conflicts with the other, and still ship quality code. Not easy.
Glamsterdam’s scalability angle is separate from Hegotá’s privacy focus, but both feed into the same broader goal: making Ethereum more capable, more resistant to manipulation, and more useful for applications that need strong guarantees — whether that’s about throughput or confidentiality.
The privacy push specifically seems to be responding to something the community has wanted for a while. Ethereum’s base layer has always been transparent by default. Every transaction, every contract call, visible on-chain. That’s fine for a lot of use cases, but it’s pretty much a dealbreaker for anything requiring financial privacy, confidential business logic, or sensitive personal data. Native protocol primitives for privacy would change that calculus without forcing users to trust external systems.
Whether EIP-8141, EIP-8250, and EIP-8272 all make it in remains to be seen. Wahrstätter’s post put them on the radar, but confirmation is still pending the developer discussions. FOCIL is the only one with a confirmed seat at the table.
Monday’s call at 2:00 pm UTC is where the next round of decisions gets made.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is FOCIL and why does it matter for Hegotá?
FOCIL, or Fork-choice enforced inclusion lists, is the only confirmed proposal for the Hegotá upgrade. It lets validator committees force transaction inclusion, making the Ethereum network harder to censor.
What is the Glamsterdam upgrade and when does it launch?
Glamsterdam is a separate Ethereum upgrade targeting scalability, layer-1 security, and user-friendliness, with a mainnet launch expected in the latter half of 2026 per the public roadmap.
Why It Matters
The narrowing of proposals for the Hegotá upgrade underscores the Ethereum community's prioritization of privacy features, which are increasingly crucial as regulatory scrutiny intensifies globally. Successful implementation of enhanced privacy measures could significantly influence user adoption and investor confidence, positioning Ethereum as a more appealing option for privacy-conscious developers and users in a competitive landscape. Moreover, the confirmed inclusion of FOCIL indicates a strategic move towards optimizing transaction efficiency, potentially impacting the overall network performance and scalability.
