The Ethereum Foundation Protocol cluster has published a comprehensive tier list evaluating 62 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to define the scope and timeline of the network’s upcoming Hegotá upgrade. Following extensive review by roughly 60 researchers and engineers across the protocol team, the Foundation designated two specific proposals as S-tier, or “must-ship” headliners. These mandatory proposals establish the core technical architecture of the hard fork, ensuring that development schedules and subsequent network testing are structured specifically around their safe delivery.
Ethereum Foundation Prioritizes S-Tier Proposals for Hegotá Upgrade
For the consensus layer, the headlining proposal is EIP-7805, known as Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL). Designed to significantly strengthen Ethereum’s base-layer censorship resistance, FOCIL enables a decentralized committee of validators to enforce the inclusion of valid public-mempool transactions into upcoming blocks. This mechanism prevents dominant block builders or specialized MEV relays from unilaterally excluding specific user transactions or wallet addresses.
On the execution layer, EIP-8141, or Frame Transactions, earned the mandatory label to introduce native account abstraction directly to the protocol layer. By splitting transaction execution into programmable frames for validation, gas payment, and state changes, Frame Transactions allow smart contract wallets to implement custom cryptographic signature schemes, sponsored gas mechanics, and batched interactions without reliance on centralized off-chain bundlers or relay networks.
Alongside the two primary headliners, the protocol cluster categorized secondary proposals into lower implementation tiers. A-tier proposals, including EIP-8369 for FOCIL eligibility profiles, alongside EIP-8250 and EIP-8272 for Frame Transaction key management, are slated for inclusion provided primary development milestones remain on schedule. Meanwhile, B-tier and C-tier proposals will undergo individual assessment during client testing phases, and 28 candidate EIPs were formally declined for inclusion to preserve engineering focus and prevent scope creep.
Decisive 2029 Roadmap Targets Full Post-Quantum Security
Underpinning the structural choices made for the Hegotá upgrade is a broader, long-term technical objective: establishing full post-quantum cryptography across all three core operational layers of Ethereum Layer-1 by December 2029. The Ethereum Foundation explicitly identified this target as its primary strategic north star, aligning its internal engineering deadlines with external post-quantum migration frameworks established by global technology firms including Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft. Rather than waiting for absolute certainty regarding quantum computing breakthroughs, the Foundation is operating under an aggressive assumption that quantum decryption capabilities could materialize as early as 2030, making immediate infrastructural preparation a strategic necessity.
Achieving a quantum-safe base layer by late 2029 presents a rigorous engineering timeline that demands continuous protocol iterations. Following the scheduled activation of the Glamsterdam upgrade in the fourth quarter of 2026, core development teams must maintain an average development cadence of approximately 7.2 months per hard fork. This condensed schedule requires parallel research and development, meaning specification work for subsequent forks, placeholder named I*, J*, and L*, will overlap directly with Hegotá’s testing phase.
Under this multi-fork research arc, early steps introduced in Hegotá provide the essential cryptographic primitives and flexible authentication abstractions required to swap out legacy signature schemes for lattice-based algorithms in later upgrades. By committing to an accelerated post-quantum migration schedule, the Ethereum Foundation aims to protect user assets against future technological threats while signaling the long-term durability of its base-layer settlement network.
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