Hassan Maishera
TL;DR
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Ethereum developers have agreed on the name of the network’s second major upgrade, settling on “Hegota”
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The upgrade will take place in late 2026 and will serve as the next milestone in the blockchain’s development roadmap.
Ethereum’s Hegota Upgrade Slated for Late 2026
Ethereum developers have agreed on the Hegota upgrade to take place in the second half of 2026, tagging it as the next milestone in the blockchain’s development roadmap.
The Hegota upgrade will follow “Glamsterdam,” Ethereum’s next major upgrade, which is set to roll out in early 2026. Hegota is now slated for the second half of next year, continuing a faster cadence of protocol upgrades than Ethereum has historically maintained.
This latest development comes as Ethereum developers seek to ship network changes more frequently rather than bundling large numbers of upgrades into releases that happen roughly once a year.
Developers are set to finalize the full scope of the Glamsterdam upgrade at their next meeting in early January. The Glamsterdam upgrade aims to address MEV fairness on the network.
Glamsterdam is a portmanteau of two simultaneous upgrades taking place on Ethereum’s two core layers. The developers explained that the execution layer, where transaction rules and smart contracts live, will undergo the Amsterdam upgrade, while the consensus layer, which coordinates validators and finalizes blocks, will see an upgrade known as Gloas.
The primary feature of Glamsterdam is Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), formally tracked as EIP-7732. This proposal aims to distinguish between nodes that build blocks on the Ethereum blockchain and those that propose them. Thus, it prevents any single actor from controlling which transactions are included or how they are ordered.
Developers are expected to finalize the full scope of Glamsterdam at their next meeting in early January. As a result, no major headline changes — formally known as Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) — are expected to be announced for Hegota until at least February. Even so, early speculation has already begun around what the upgrade could include.
Hegota Could Focus on Verkle Trees
The discussions around Hegota currently focus on Verkle Trees, a newer data structure designed to help Ethereum nodes store and verify large amounts of data more efficiently.
In a recent blog post, the Ethereum Foundation stated that,
“Fusaka shipped PeerDAS in addition to a myriad of minor features, and Glamsterdam’s major features will include Block-level Access Lists and enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation. Now we begin outlining the subsequent upgrade: Hegota.”
If the developers implement this feature, Verkle Trees could significantly reduce hardware requirements for node operators, improving decentralization by making it easier for more participants to run nodes.
