Attendees at Ethereum Devcon in Prague with a strong encryption message

Ethereum Has 66 Ideas for Its Next Major Upgrade. Only a Few Will Shape What Comes Next

By Isaac • August 16, 2026 3:21 pm • Comments

Ethereum has no shortage of ideas for what its base layer should become. The harder part is deciding which ideas are mature enough to build, test and ship.

That decision is now underway for Hegotá, the major Ethereum upgrade targeted for 2027. Developers are starting with 66 proposals, but only a much smaller group is likely to survive the next rounds of technical review.

Cointelegraph reports that several of the strongest early candidates are aimed at giving Ethereum better privacy tools and stronger resistance to transaction censorship. Hegotá is expected to follow Glamsterdam, the upgrade currently positioned for the second half of 2026.

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The size of the opening list matters. Sixty-six proposals is not a feature checklist.

It is a field of competing priorities, implementation costs and security tradeoffs. The next few core developer calls will determine which ideas receive client implementations, development networks and testnet time—the work that separates an interesting proposal from code with a realistic path to mainnet.

FOCIL is the lone proposal already scheduled for the upgrade. The rest still have to earn scarce engineering attention, and proposals that miss this cut can be reconsidered in a later upgrade instead of being forced into an overloaded release.

Ethereum Foundation contributor Toni Wahrstätter laid out the process directly:

FOCIL—short for fork-choice enforced inclusion lists—is the only proposal currently scheduled for Hegotá. Its basic goal is censorship resistance: a committee of validators could require pending transactions to be included in blocks, making it harder for one block producer to keep a valid transaction out.

FOCIL does not hide transaction details. It tackles whether users can reliably get valid transactions onto the chain when a producer would rather exclude them.

Three other proposals are drawing attention as a possible privacy package. The official specifications describe Frame Transactions under EIP-8141, Keyed Nonces under EIP-8250 and Recent Roots for Frame Transactions under EIP-8272.

Taken together, the proposals are intended to provide lower-level building blocks that privacy applications can use without leaning as heavily on intermediaries. Their inclusion would shift important account and state-handling capabilities into Ethereum itself.

Ethereum applications can already build privacy systems above the base layer, but native protocol support can reduce awkward workarounds and give developers more dependable primitives.

It can also move privacy from a niche application concern into the network’s core design conversation. That makes the Hegotá selection consequential even before developers settle the final bundle.

The three specifications solve different pieces of the same engineering puzzle. Frame Transactions define a new transaction structure, Keyed Nonces let accounts maintain separate nonce sequences, and Recent Roots give frame transactions access to recent state roots.

None of that guarantees a private application by itself. The value is in giving wallet and application developers protocol-level components they can combine, test and audit instead of rebuilding the same machinery through outside services.

Crypto roadmaps often reward the longest list and the biggest promise. Ethereum’s upgrade process works better when it does the opposite.

Every additional EIP expands the testing surface, the number of client interactions and the chance that one change complicates another.

A disciplined Hegotá scope should therefore leave many proposals behind. Missing the 2027 release would send a proposal back to research and testing for another upgrade cycle.

A technically valuable proposal can return later with stronger implementations, cleaner interactions and more evidence from test networks.

For users and investors, the immediate takeaway is not that all 66 ideas are coming to Ethereum. It is that privacy and censorship resistance have earned serious places in the 2027 discussion, while the network’s developers are being forced to show which proposals can survive contact with implementation reality.

Glamsterdam still comes first, with work aimed at scalability, layer-one resilience and usability. Hegotá’s narrowing process now puts each proposed 2027 change through the harder test: enough value, enough maturity and a manageable security cost.

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