Two S-tier upgrades emerge for Hegotá
Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Hegotá, now has two defined core tracks. After reviewing 62 candidate Ethereum Improvement Proposals, the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol team placed FOCIL (EIP-7805) and Frame Transactions (EIP-8141) in the highest-priority S-tier as the upgrade’s two headliners.
The two proposals split across Ethereum’s core layers. FOCIL targets censorship resistance at the consensus layer, while Frame Transactions would introduce native account abstraction at the execution layer. At the same time, the foundation tied the broader roadmap to a specific date for the first time, setting December 2029 as the target for Ethereum L1 to become quantum-resistant across the execution, consensus and data layers. Hegotá itself is not described as the post-quantum hard fork, but as the first key checkpoint for whether that roadmap can be delivered on time.
FOCIL and Frame Transactions rose above 62 candidates
According to the Ethereum Foundation, the Hegotá scoping process received 62 EIPs and involved about 60 researchers and engineers. Only two made it into the S-tier headliner category: EIP-7805 FOCIL, short for Fork-choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, on the consensus side, and EIP-8141 Frame Transactions on the execution side.
The foundation said that safely shipping both features, and testing how they interact, is the central engineering commitment of Hegotá.
FOCIL is aimed at builder-driven censorship risk
FOCIL is a direct response to censorship risk created by the increasing specialization of Ethereum block building. Under the current proposer-builder separation, or PBS, structure, many blocks are assembled by professional builders and then proposed by validators. That setup improves MEV extraction and block-building efficiency. It also means a small set of large builders could weaken Ethereum’s censorship resistance if they refuse to process certain transactions.
Under FOCIL, a selected set of validators would build an inclusion list containing valid mempool transactions they can see. The next block’s builder or proposer would, in principle, be required to include those transactions, and attesters would only vote for blocks that satisfy the inclusion-list constraints.
That changes who controls transaction inclusion. Instead of leaving that power to a single builder, EIP-7805 spreads it across multiple validators, reducing the ability of one block builder to block transactions on its own.
Frame Transactions split validation, gas payment and execution
The other upgrade has a more visible effect on everyday users. EIP-8141 Frame Transactions would break a transaction into programmable frames that separately handle validation, gas payment and execution, rather than tying those functions tightly together in the traditional Ethereum transaction format.
That opens several paths. Wallets or decentralized applications could rely on a third-party paymaster to cover gas, meaning users would not always need to hold ETH before sending a transaction. Transactions could also use custom signature schemes and batch multiple actions together.
The formal specification for EIP-8141 says the gas payer for the new transaction type can be determined by a frame inside the transaction, rather than being fixed as the originating account. For users, the simplest outcome is easy to picture: someone interacting with a dApp could complete a transaction even if their wallet holds no ETH. Applications could subsidize gas directly or create payment models using other tokens, making Web3 interactions feel closer to conventional internet services than to a system where users must first buy ETH as fuel for every action.
Its deeper role is to loosen Ethereum’s dependence on ECDSA
The Ethereum Foundation said the reason EIP-8141 is a must-ship item for Hegotá goes beyond user experience. In the foundation’s latest Protocol documents, Frame Transactions are described as a major prerequisite for Ethereum’s post-quantum security path.
Today, standard Ethereum accounts rely on the secp256k1 elliptic curve and ECDSA signatures. If large fault-tolerant quantum computers ever mature, Shor’s algorithm could, in theory, break that class of elliptic-curve cryptography.
Frame Transactions change the structure by decoupling the account from a fixed ECDSA key and making transaction validation programmable. That would allow Ethereum users to switch to new post-quantum signature schemes in the future without requiring a hard fork every time the base transaction format needs to be adjusted for another signing method. The foundation refers to that flexibility as cryptographic agility.
December 2029 becomes Ethereum’s first explicit post-quantum deadline
The Hegotá planning process also produced a more concrete date for Ethereum’s post-quantum work. The EF Protocol team proposed a new north star: by December 2029, Ethereum L1 should achieve quantum resistance across the execution, consensus and data layers.
The foundation said that timeline broadly aligns with post-quantum cryptography migration targets currently used by Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft. Material on Ethereum.org also points to a 2026 estimate from Google Quantum AI suggesting that breaking 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography could require about 1,200 logical qubits.
Quantum computers remain well short of that scale in practical terms, so the issue is not being presented as an immediate short-term security threat. The migration of cryptographic systems, though, can take years. That is why the foundation is working from a relatively aggressive assumption and wants Ethereum prepared for a Q-day that could arrive as early as around 2030.
The foundation also said most credible estimates still suggest that a quantum computer capable of threatening Ethereum may arrive later, or may never arrive at all. In that framing, 2030 is a deliberately conservative security assumption, not a prediction about the pace of quantum-computing progress.
Hegotá is the first step, not the end of the roadmap
For that reason, Hegotá should not be read as the upgrade that makes Ethereum post-quantum by itself. Its real role is to open room for the upgrades that follow.
In the Ethereum Foundation’s current strawmap, Hegotá is expected to be followed by hard forks tentatively labeled I, J, K and L. The I fork is expected to add a post-quantum public-key registry. J is planned as the minimum viable post-quantum milestone, including a post-quantum heartbeat for the consensus layer, leanDA sampling for the data layer, and leanSPHINCS transactions for the execution layer. Full post-quantum capability across execution, consensus and data is then tentatively assigned to either K or L.
The schedule is tight, and the two headliners serve three long-term goals
The timetable leaves little slack. If Glamsterdam launches in December 2026 and full post-quantum security must be completed by December 2029, Ethereum would need to deliver roughly one hard fork every 7.2 months under the existing five-fork route.
The foundation acknowledged that this is an aggressive development pace with limited room for error. Hegotá, I and J therefore will not be developed strictly one after another in the traditional way. Parts of the research, specification work and engineering process are expected to move in parallel.
Seen together, the two confirmed headliners address three longer-term Ethereum issues at once. FOCIL works on censorship resistance and block-building concentration risk. Frame Transactions improve wallet design and gas payment flows. Native account abstraction, underneath that user-facing change, also lays protocol groundwork for moving away from secp256k1 and introducing post-quantum signatures.
The part users are most likely to notice is that a dApp could pay gas on their behalf. For Ethereum’s longer roadmap, the more important shift is structural: accounts would no longer be locked to a fixed ECDSA-key model, giving Ethereum a way to migrate its L1 toward a different cryptographic foundation before quantum computing becomes a real threat.
That is why the Ethereum Foundation’s framing is narrower and more consequential at the same time. Hegotá is not the post-quantum hard fork, but it may determine whether the post-quantum hard fork can arrive on schedule.