Ethereum developers agreed earlier this month on the name and rough timeline of the network’s second major upgrade planned for 2026, choosing “Hegota” as the next step in the blockchain development roadmap.
Hegota will follow “Glamsterdam,” Ethereum’s next major upgrade, which is currently scheduled to roll out in the first half of 2026. This sequencing tentatively places Hegota in the second half of the year, continuing a faster cadence of protocol upgrades than Ethereum has historically maintained.
The decision reflects a relatively new approach to Ethereum development, with major contributors seeking to make changes to the network more frequently rather than grouping a large number of upgrades into releases that occur approximately once a year. The change comes after the developers faced criticism from parts of the Ethereum community earlier this year, with some users and builders arguing that the protocol’s development lagged behind the network’s rapid growth and increasing demands.
The developers are expected to finalize the entire Glamsterdam project at their next meeting in early January. As a result, no major changes – officially known as Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) – are expected to be announced for Hegota until at least February. Despite this, early speculation has already begun about what the upgrade might include.
A likely source of potential features for Hegota is Glamsterdam’s delayed work. In previous Ethereum upgrades, EIPs that failed to release due to time or complexity constraints were often pushed to the next upgrade, and developers expect a similar dynamic this time around.
Early discussions around Hegota focused on Verkle Trees, a new data structure designed to help Ethereum nodes store and verify large amounts of data more efficiently. If implemented, Verkle Trees could significantly reduce hardware requirements for node operators, thereby improving decentralization by allowing more participants to run nodes more easily.
As with previous upgrades, the name “Hegota” follows Ethereum’s convention of combining a Devcon host city with a star name. In this case, the name is derived from “Bogota”, the execution layer upgrade, and “Heze”, the consensus layer upgrade.
“Fusaka has delivered PeerDAS in addition to a myriad of minor features and major features of Glamsterdam will include block-level access lists and separation between proposers and builders. We are now beginning to describe the subsequent upgrade: Hegota,” the Ethereum Foundation said in a recent blog post.
Read more: Ethereum ‘Glamsterdam’ Upgrade Aims to Improve MEV Equity
