Ethereum’s core developers are starting to sketch the contours of the network’s next major upgrade, and two proposals have been singled out as non-negotiable. The Ethereum Foundation has named EIP-7805 and EIP-8141 as “must ship” features for the planned Hegota upgrade, Cointelegraph reported, meaning the Foundation would rather slip the timeline than release the upgrade without them.
The first, EIP-7805, is better known by its nickname FOCIL, and it lives at the consensus layer. Its goal is to give ordinary users a reliable path to get their eligible transactions included in blocks without depending on a handful of centralized block builders. In practical terms, it is a censorship-resistance measure: the more routes a transaction has to reach the chain, the harder it is for any single intermediary to quietly exclude it.
The second, EIP-8141, is nicknamed Frame Transactions and sits at the execution layer. According to the report, it introduces native account abstraction, long a wish-list item for developers who want wallets to behave more flexibly, and lays groundwork for post-quantum authentication, a hedge against the day when quantum computers might threaten today’s cryptographic signatures. Paired with companion proposals, it is also meant to provide protocol-level building blocks for privacy applications.
The two headline features emerged from a broad winnowing process. The Foundation evaluated 62 EIPs with input from roughly 60 researchers and engineers across its Protocol cluster, Cointelegraph reported. Of those, 15 proposals landed in the top “A-tier” expected to ship, eight were kept as candidates, seven sat below the line without being ruled out, and 28 were declined outright. Two more were left unranked, pending performance data from the earlier Glamsterdam upgrade on mainnet.
Timing remains fluid. Client teams could begin implementation work in late 2026, following Glamsterdam, and the Foundation made clear that the two must-ship items carry special weight: if either looks at risk, Hegota’s schedule should move before the proposal gets cut. That is a notable inversion of the usual pressure, where looming release dates tend to shave features off the list.
The roadmap also shows how Ethereum’s priorities have shifted. The network’s previous upgrade, Fusaka, launched on December 3, 2025, with the data-availability feature PeerDAS as its centerpiece, a scaling play aimed at cheaper rollups. Hegota, by contrast, leans toward hardening the base layer itself: keeping the chain resistant to censorship, modernizing how accounts work, and beginning to future-proof its cryptography. For a network that increasingly settles serious value, those are the kinds of guarantees that matter long after the block-space headlines fade.
Written for Red Robot with AI assistance and human editing. Based on reporting by Cointelegraph.
