Ethereum developers earlier this month agreed on a name and rough timing for the network’s second major upgrade, scheduled for 2026, settling on “hegota” as the next milestone on the blockchain development roadmap.
Hegota follows Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Gramsterdam, which is currently scheduled to be rolled out in the first half of 2026. That order tentatively places Hegota in the second half of this year, continuing a faster pace of protocol upgrades than Ethereum has historically maintained.
This decision reflects a relatively new approach to Ethereum development, with core contributors aiming to ship changes to the network more frequently, rather than bundling large amounts of upgrades into roughly once-a-year releases. The change comes after developers faced criticism from parts of the Ethereum community earlier this year, with some users and builders claiming that protocol development has lagged compared to the network’s rapid growth and increased demand.
Developers plan to finalize the full scope of Gramsterdam at their next meeting in early January. As a result, no major headline changes are expected to be announced regarding Hegota, officially known as the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP), until at least February. Still, early speculation has already begun as to what the upgrade will include.
One potential cause of Hegota function is deferred work from Gramsterdam. In previous Ethereum upgrades, EIPs that missed release due to time or complexity constraints were often postponed to the next upgrade, and developers are hoping for a similar move this time around.
Early discussions on Hegota focused on Verkle Trees, a new data structure designed to allow Ethereum nodes to more efficiently store and verify large amounts of data. Once implemented, Verkle Trees will significantly reduce hardware requirements for node operators, making it easier for more participants to run nodes and increasing decentralization.
As with past upgrades, the name “Hegota” follows Ethereum’s convention of combining the Devcon host city and star name. In this case, the name comes from “Bogota” for the execution layer upgrade and “Heze” for the consensus layer upgrade.
“Fusaka will ship PeerDAS in addition to a myriad of minor features, and Gramsterdam’s major features will include block-level access lists and proposer-constructor separation. We are now beginning to outline a subsequent upgrade, Hegota,” the Ethereum Foundation said in a recent blog post.
Read more: Ethereum’s “gramsterdam” upgrade aims to fix MEV fairness
