The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol cluster said in a post published Monday that it has set December 2029 as the target date for making Ethereum’s base layer quantum-resistant across all three layers: execution, consensus and data.
The group said it will treat that self-imposed deadline as non-negotiable until at least January 2027. At that point, it plans to reassess the state of quantum computing with guidance from outside experts.
According to the post, the timeline matches separate 2029 migration targets set by Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft. The cluster said Ethereum should plan for “Q-day” arriving as early as 2030, the moment when a quantum computer could break the cryptography that secures wallets.
It described that assumption as deliberately aggressive. The post added that most credible estimates put Q-day later, and that it may never arrive at all.
Fork schedule leaves little room for delay
The post said that shipping Glamsterdam in December 2026 and reaching full post-quantum readiness by the end of 2029 would require an average pace of one hard fork every 7.2 months. The Protocol cluster said that cadence leaves little room for error.
Rather than moving one fork at a time, the upgrades would need to overlap. The plan sits inside a draft roadmap that lays out seven forks through 2029.
Hegotá grades 62 EIPs
The cluster said it evaluated 62 EIPs proposed for Hegotá and published one unified tier list. That ranking combined 397 grades from nine client teams and individual domain experts, covering roughly 60 researchers and engineers.
Two proposals were classified as “must-ship.” One was FOCIL, or fork-choice enforced inclusion lists, on the consensus layer. The other was Frame Transactions on the execution layer.
The post said Frame Transactions would make account abstraction native. That would allow new signature schemes to be introduced without a separate hard fork for each one, while also giving accounts a path away from vulnerable secp256k1 keys.
By the cluster’s own description, Hegotá is not the upgrade that delivers post-quantum protection itself. Instead, it determines whether later post-quantum upgrades can still arrive on time. The post said that framing matches Vitalik Buterin’s description of Hegotá as the last fork before Ethereum begins a multi-year rebuild.
Rejected proposals and next steps
About 28 proposals were declined for inclusion in Hegotá. One of them was EIP-8363, a proposal that would taper issuance and burn the difference.
The cluster said EIP-8363 was unanimously rejected for inclusion in the fork. It added that the vote was not a judgment on the proposal’s merits. In its view, issuance policy affects every staker and holder and belongs in a broader ecosystem process, not in an exercise focused on defining a fork’s scope.
The Protocol cluster said it will answer questions about the grades during a Reddit AMA on r/ethereum on Sept. 16.