Ethereum Foundation Ranks 62 Proposals for 2027 Hegotá Upgrade, Gives Client Teams Until September 10

A tier list decides Ethereum's next two years

Ethereum's core research arm just handed down its verdict on the network's next major upgrade. The Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Cluster published a tier list on its blog grading roughly 62 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for Hegotá, the upgrade slated for 2027 that follows Glamsterdam, which developers are targeting for the fourth quarter of 2026.

According to the Ethereum Foundation blog, about 60 researchers and engineers across nine teams filled out contribution templates and produced 397 individual tier grades, averaging 6.4 grades per proposal. The scoring runs S (must ship, defines the fork), A (high priority, expected to ship), B (on the bubble), C (below the line but not disqualified), and DFI (declined for inclusion, with a stated reason attached to each). The Foundation says per-team grades were not published, only the aggregated, argued-over final tier.

Client teams building Ethereum's software now have until September 10, 2026 to submit their own ranked preferences, which get compared against the cluster's list. The Foundation has also scheduled a public Reddit AMA in r/ethereum for September 16 at 14:00 UTC, according to KuCoin's ChainCatcher report, where the cluster says it will field questions on the direction.

One proposal is locked. Everything else is a fight

FOCIL, formally EIP-7805, is the only proposal multiple sources describe as officially scheduled for Hegotá, according to both Crypto.news and BigGo Finance. FOCIL would let a committee of validators publish inclusion lists that block builders are expected to honor, and attesters could reject a block if a builder improperly left eligible transactions out. Developers frame it as a defense against censorship as block production concentrates among a shrinking number of specialized builders, a genuine structural worry given how much of Ethereum's block-building market now runs through a handful of relays and builders.

Everything else is still contested. Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter posted on X, cited by both Decrypt and Crypto.news, that the Protocol Architecture team wants to prioritize Frame Transactions (EIP-8141) alongside FOCIL. Frame Transactions would let wallets define their own rules for how a transaction is authorized, executed, and paid for, opening the door to gas sponsorship, bundled operations, and alternative signature schemes without users abandoning their existing addresses, according to Crowdfund Insider.

Wahrstätter's pitch, per Decrypt: pair Frame Transactions with Transaction Assertions (EIP-7906) and a nonce-management upgrade so privacy pools can pay their own network fees instead of relying on a third-party relayer that can expose wallet activity. "Together with Frames, these enable privacy pools where the pool itself can pay fees, removing the need for intermediaries," Wahrstätter wrote, adding that FOCIL support would give those transactions "protocol-level inclusion guarantees."

The sourcing gets messy on exactly which EIP number covers what. Crowdfund Insider identifies Keyed Nonces as EIP-8250 and a separate proposal called Root References as EIP-8272. Decrypt and Crypto.news both describe "Keyed Nonces and Recent Roots" as a single item under EIP-8272. Crypto.news separately notes that EIP-8141 is still being compared against a rival account-abstraction proposal, EIP-8130, and remains under consideration rather than locked in.

The proposal count doesn't quite line up either

Wahrstätter said on August 16, per Crowdfund Insider, that developers had 66 EIPs under consideration for Hegotá. The Foundation's own tier list, published later, covers 62. Neither the Foundation's blog post nor the other sources explain the gap directly, though it's consistent with a scoping process that's actively narrowing the field rather than adding to it.

Quantum resistance, but not until 2029

A companion post from the Protocol Cluster lays out longer-term priorities, including a stated goal of quantum resistance for Ethereum's base layer by December 2029, according to KuCoin's ChainCatcher report. Ethlabs, an independent nonprofit research lab that is roughly eight weeks old according to BigGo Finance, published its own tier list on August 16 giving Frame Transactions A-tier support as the preferred path to native account abstraction, while placing Quick Slots (EIP-8198) in its top S-tier with a goal of cutting Ethereum's 12-second slot time down to 10 seconds within about a year. Ethlabs also gave S-tier status to two Layer 1 scaling proposals, EIP-8131 and EIP-8279, addressing data pricing and bandwidth accounting, but declined to rank EIP-8363, a monetary-policy proposal, saying that decision needs broader community debate first.

What happens after September 10

The Foundation hasn't spelled out, in the material it has published so far, exactly who breaks a tie if client teams' rankings conflict with the Protocol Cluster's tier list, or what happens if a B-tier proposal that needs a prototype, a sign-off, and a settled specification can't clear those bars before devnets for the S- and A-tier items are stable. Wahrstätter has been blunt about the tradeoff on X: "A fork can't be a wishlist... we have to decide what Ethereum should become next, and what has to wait." The next concrete checkpoint is the September 10 deadline itself, followed by the September 16 Reddit AMA where the cluster says it will take public questions on which proposals survive the cut.