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Ethereum Hegotá Priorities Put FOCIL First as Privacy and RowDAS Work Advances
Protocol ranking sets fork priorities while privacy validation costs and blob recovery remain active research areas
TL;DR
- Ethereum’s Protocol Cluster has issued its first unified ranking of proposals for Hegotá, with FOCIL emerging as the fork’s top consensus-layer priority.
- Privacy work is expected to begin with Hegotá, but current EIP-8141 validation limits remain below the proof costs measured for studied privacy transactions.
- A reduced RowDAS design sharply lowered simulated blob-reconstruction CPU work without yet providing the resilience features planned for full RowDAS.
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Ethereum’s Protocol Cluster has ranked all 62 EIPs proposed for Hegotá, putting FOCIL at the top of the fork’s priorities while separate work on privacy transactions and blob recovery shows both progress and unresolved technical constraints. The unified ranking, published on September 7, 2026, is the first time the Protocol Cluster has presented a single fork-wide view rather than leaving individual teams to publish separate positions.
The tier system gives each category a specific delivery meaning. An S grade means a proposal defines the fork and the schedule should move before its scope is sacrificed. An A grade signals an expectation that the feature will ship and may be removed only after S-tier work is secure. B-tier proposals are considered individually and generally require a prototype, sign-off and settled specification. C-tier proposals remain below the main inclusion line without being disqualified, while DFI means “declined for inclusion.” A separate TBD category covers proposals awaiting additional mainnet data.
Only FOCIL, EIP-7805, received an unqualified S grade. The proposal is intended to let any user get an eligible transaction included without depending on centralized block builders, making it the ranking’s clearest consensus-layer commitment. FOCIL also received a unanimous top grade at full participation.
The scoring process involved roughly 60 researchers and engineers working across nine teams alongside individual domain experts. Contributors submitted 16 contribution templates, with 12 providing actual tier grades. Some participants limited their scoring to proposals within their areas of expertise.
Altogether, contributors produced 397 grades, or an average of 6.4 per EIP, while the most contested proposals received as many as nine grades each. Contributors scored independently, and the Protocol Cluster said Geth, as an execution-layer client, will still publish its own standalone list.
Hegotá feeds into Ethereum’s post-quantum and privacy roadmap
The Hegotá ranking also sits within a longer-term plan to make Ethereum’s base layer quantum-resistant across execution, consensus and data by December 2029. That target aligns with migration timelines independently established by Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft.
The Foundation is planning around a hypothetical 2030 “Q-day” and characterizes that assumption as deliberately aggressive because credible estimates place cryptography-breaking quantum computers further into the future, if they arrive at all. Ethereum nevertheless intends to treat its self-imposed deadline as non-negotiable until a January 2027 reassessment with outside experts.
Assuming Glamsterdam launches in December 2026, Ethereum would need to maintain an average pace of 7.2 months per fork through a fifth future upgrade referred to as L*. Protocol research is currently organized around five overlapping arcs: fast finality, post-quantum, privacy, state and zkEVM.
Privacy work is expected to start during Hegotá rather than wait for a later post-quantum fork. The Protocol Cluster said, “We believe this work should start in Hegota to deliver native, trustless, censorship resistant private transactions on Ethereum L1.”
The Protocol Cluster’s sequence calls for native privacy work first and post-quantum privacy at scale later. Hegotá itself is not presented as the final post-quantum fork; rather, it is expected to influence how quickly Ethereum reaches that milestone. Client teams could realistically begin Hegotá implementation in late Q4 2026.
EIP-8141 privacy proposal faces a validation-budget gap
A separate privacy issue centers on EIP-8141, Ethereum’s proposed Frames transaction design. A change submitted on September 5, 2026 by contributor AnkushinDaniil would let individual nodes accept transactions that exceed the shared public validation allowance, although doing so would not require the wider public network to relay those transactions. The proposed change remains under review.
The modification would turn the existing validation maximum into a common mandatory floor. Nodes would still have to propagate qualifying transactions that fit within that shared budget, while nodes with greater capacity could locally accept more expensive transactions.
That distinction matters for the Tornado Cash and RAILGUN designs examined in a privacy benchmark. Replacing off-chain relayers with ordinary public submission requires privacy proofs that nodes will accept and forward across the public network. A transaction accepted only by more capable nodes would not receive that network-wide propagation guarantee.
The current EIP-8141 draft limits signature checks and execution from the initial validation stage through payment approval to 100,000 gas. Gas in this setting measures computational work, and the limit is intended to constrain node workload and denial-of-service exposure.
A benchmark published by mmjahanara on September 2, 2026 found that an optimized Groth16 proof verifier exceeded that allowance before the full modeled transaction cost was included.
The benchmark’s accounting differs from the current EIP-8250 companion draft. EIP-8250 charges fresh nonce keys against state gas, a separate budget, instead of execution gas. The benchmark totals therefore represent its own model rather than verified costs under the latest combined proposals, although that accounting difference does not remove the reported Groth16 verifier’s execution-cost gap.
The recommended allowance would also remain below the modeled eight-note transaction. The benchmark assumes applications would make additional changes, including moving non-verification work into later frames, optimizing verifiers and compressing proof inputs. Its SHA-256 compression option reduces on-chain input requirements while increasing proof-generation work on users’ devices.
A larger validation allowance would address only one constraint. EIP-8250 also preserves one pending public-mempool transaction per sender, which creates another limitation for privacy designs that share an address.
Public propagation is separate from block validity under the proposals. EIP-8141 permits transactions outside its shared public rules to enter local or private mempools. EIP-8369 separately describes future rules for enforcing transaction inclusion, including custom or direct submissions, but requires a binding protocol extension.
The practical tradeoff is therefore between accommodating expensive privacy proofs and limiting the computational work that incoming transactions can impose on nodes. The proposed EIP-8141 change would provide additional flexibility at individual nodes, while guaranteed public access for the studied privacy designs would still require a network-wide allowance capable of supporting their proof-validation costs.
Reduced RowDAS design cuts duplicated blob-recovery work
Ethereum researchers are also testing a smaller implementation path toward RowDAS that focuses first on reducing duplicated blob-recovery computation. Researcher Csaba Kiraly published the results on September 3, 2026, presenting the reduced design as a possible first step toward full RowDAS.
The prototype reported an 11–18× reduction in estimated reconstruction computing work across simulations involving 1,000 nodes. Rather than allowing multiple capable nodes to independently rebuild the same missing blob data, the design assigns particular blobs to designated recovery nodes first and lets other nodes obtain the reconstructed cells through existing distribution channels.
Blobs carry data used by layer-2 rollups. Under PeerDAS, nodes can download only part of the data. High-custody nodes retain at least 64 of 128 data columns, enough to reconstruct missing blob data, while supernodes retain all 128.
Repeated reconstruction by multiple high-custody nodes can create duplicated processor work. The reduced design attempts to suppress that duplication while leaving a delayed high-custody recovery path available for data that remains missing.
The simulations produced the following network-wide reconstruction estimates:
The CPU-second totals measure accumulated computing work across the simulated network rather than elapsed recovery time. The accounting uses a measured 162-millisecond cost per blob recovery on an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS processor. Transaction speed and fee savings were outside the measurements.
PeerDAS was also given credit for existing duplication controls in the comparison. Its modeled baseline already includes randomized waiting and checks that can prevent unnecessary reconstruction rather than assuming every capable node immediately performs the same work.
The reduced design distributes recovered cells through existing column-distribution channels and keeps high-custody nodes as a delayed backstop. That approach avoids immediately adding the new row-networking channels envisioned by full RowDAS.
Draft EIP-8371 would go further. Full RowDAS would create row channels that allow smaller nodes to pool their holdings and collectively reconstruct data once their combined information reaches the recovery threshold. The reduced design retains current dependence on high-custody nodes and therefore does not provide that additional resilience.
The measurements remain simulation results produced by in-process networks using real cryptography, and Kiraly reported no devnet results. Full RowDAS’s proposed 128-row-subnet configuration also remains an extrapolation from smaller subnet counts, with larger simulations and real-network testing still ahead.
EIP-8371 leaves Ethereum’s blob limits unchanged. The proposed separation between recovery-duty assignment and later row networking has also not yet been incorporated into the draft. The immediate work therefore centers on reducing recovery-related processor demand, while the broader resilience improvements depend on the full row-networking layer.
This article has been refined and enhanced by ChatGPT.
