Ethereum developers earlier this month agreed on the name and estimated timing of the network’s second major upgrade, scheduled for 2026, and settled on “Hegota” as the next milestone in the blockchain’s development roadmap.
Hegota will follow Ethereum’s next major upgrade, “Glamsterdam”, which is currently expected to launch in the first half of 2026. This sequence places Hegota tentatively in the second half of the year, continuing the faster cadence of protocol upgrades than Ethereum has historically maintained.
The decision reflects a relatively new approach to Ethereum development, in which core contributors aim to ship network changes more frequently rather than bundling a large number of upgrades into a release that occurs approximately once a year. The change comes after developers faced criticism from parts of the Ethereum community earlier this year, with some users and builders arguing that protocol development was lagging behind the network’s rapid growth and increasing demands.
The developers are expected to finalize the full scope of Glamstardom at their next meeting in early January. As a result, no major title changes to Hegota – formally known as the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) – are expected to be announced until at least February. Nevertheless, early speculation has already begun about what the upgrade might include.
One possible source of potential Hegota features is deferred action from Glamsterdam. In previous Ethereum upgrades, EIPs that failed to make it to release due to lack of time or complexity were often pushed into the following upgrades, and developers expect similar dynamics this time.
Early discussions around Hegota have focused on Verkl Trees, a new data structure designed to help Ethereum nodes store and verify large amounts of data more efficiently. If implemented, vernal trees could significantly reduce the hardware requirements for node operators, and improve decentralization by making it easier for more participants to run nodes.
Like previous upgrades, the name “Haegota” follows the tradition of combining Ethereum’s DevCon host city with a star name. In this case, the name is derived from “Bogotá,” the execution layer upgrade, and “Haze,” the consensus layer upgrade.
The Ethereum Foundation said in a recent blog post, “In addition to the myriad smaller features Fusaaka shipped to Peerdas, the major features of Glamstardom will include block-level access lists and established proposer-builder separation. We now begin outlining the subsequent upgrade: Hegota.”
Read More: Ethereum’s ‘Glamsterdam’ upgrade aims to fix MEV fairness