The Ethereum Foundation has assessed 62 improvement proposals for the coming "Hegotá" upgrade and classified two of them as mandatory. Those two are meant to make the Ethereum blockchain fully quantum-safe by December 2029.
An Ethereum Improvement Proposal, or EIP, is the formal route through which someone proposes a change to the core protocol, while the Protocol Cluster of the Ethereum Foundation gathers the research and engineering groups that coordinate such changes across all client teams. Hegotá follows the alphabetical naming convention drawn from Devcon host cities, so it becomes the next major network upgrade after Glamsterdam. The assessment appeared on the foundation's blog and reflects the work of roughly 60 researchers and engineers from nine teams plus individual subject-matter experts. For the first time, a single shared list replaces separate team judgments. Together the reviewers produced 397 tier ratings, an average of 6.4 per proposal, rising to as many as nine for the most contested entries.
Subscribe to our newsletter
The best articles of the week, directly delivered into your mailbox.
FOCIL and Frame Transactions as mandatory work for Hegotá
Only two of the 62 proposals reached the top S tier, which the cluster describes as "must-ship". The first is EIP-7805, known among developers as FOCIL, short for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists. FOCIL operates at the consensus layer, where a committee of validators forces valid transactions from the public mempool into the next block, so that a dominant block builder can no longer filter them out. It addresses censorship resistance, one of the most sensitive weaknesses of a blockchain whose block production has concentrated among a few specialized actors. For Ethereum the question is not theoretical, now that a large share of blocks runs through a handful of professional builders.
The second mandatory proposal is called Frame Transactions and carries the number EIP-8141. It sits at the execution layer and anchors account abstraction natively in the protocol, with a transaction splitting into programmable "frames" for validation, gas payment and execution. Wallets could then use their own signature schemes, let sponsors cover gas payments and bundle actions together without depending on off-chain operators. The first of those points makes the proposal central to the quantum question, because anyone who can freely swap out an account's signature scheme has already built half the migration path toward quantum-safe methods.
Companion proposals in the A tier hang on both candidates. EIP-8369 belongs to FOCIL and governs the eligibility profiles for committee participation, while Frame Transactions brings EIP-8250 on keyed nonces and EIP-8272 on recent roots with it. Shipping both candidates safely and testing how they interact counts for the cluster as the central technical commitment of this fork. Everything else ranks below that.
One shared tier list instead of separate team opinions
Until now the individual client and research teams commented separately on pending changes to the core protocol, without any shared ranking. The tier list published now is the first bundled assessment by the Protocol Cluster for a single network upgrade. Every proposal received an average of 6.4 independent ratings, and where the teams disagreed that number climbed to as many as nine. Anyone holding Ethereum as an infrastructure investment thus gets a quantified picture, for the first time, of how broadly the teams back a given proposal.
Below the two S-tier entries, 15 proposals landed in the A tier, slated to ship alongside them, and a further eight entries sit in the B tier with seven in the C tier. Another 28 EIPs were rejected with the note "Declined for Inclusion", almost half of the entire field. Two more proposals were deliberately left unrated, pending operating data from the Glamsterdam mainnet. What stands out is the severity of the selection. The cluster visibly uses the list as an instrument to keep the scope of the fork small, rather than to accommodate as many concerns as possible.
For outside perception the change in procedure weighs almost more heavily than the content. Ethereum's core development long counted as hard to read: priorities could only be reconstructed from scattered calls, forum threads and individual opinions. A single list with traceable tiers moves that debate into a format that holds up to scrutiny even outside developer circles.
The quantum-safe timetable leaves Ethereum little room
The foundation's actual target does not sit with Hegotá but several forks beyond it. By December 2029 all three layers of the protocol, execution, consensus and data, should be quantum-safe. For planning purposes the team assumes a possible "Q-Day" from 2030 onward, meaning the day on which quantum computers could break the cryptography in use today. That assumption is deliberately aggressive: most credible estimates place the moment considerably further out. The deadline counts internally as non-negotiable through January 2027, and the team plans to reassess the position with external experts once that date passes.
In arithmetic terms the schedule is tight. Glamsterdam is due in Q4 2026, and client teams can realistically only begin implementing Hegotá once it ships. From there to December 2029 an average cadence of 7.2 months per fork remains, a pace that tolerates almost no delay given the multi-year lead times of earlier protocol changes such as The Merge in 2022 or Dencun in 2024. A single postponed fork costs roughly seven months of that.
Hegotá itself is not the post-quantum fork. It is the fork that decides whether the post-quantum upgrades that follow stay on schedule at all. The cluster places a minimally viable post-quantum milestone at a placeholder it calls "J*", while full quantum resistance sits at "L*". Several forks therefore lie between today and that point, and their names have not even been fixed yet.
Ethereum's deadline follows Google and Microsoft
The date is no solo effort by the crypto industry, given that Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft have set their own migration targets for post-quantum cryptography, and the December 2029 deadline follows those independent roadmaps. For institutional holders that is the more relevant framing. Ethereum is not moving its security level into unknown terrain but into the cadence that the operators of the rest of the critical internet infrastructure are heading for anyway. A protocol that fell behind in that process would at some point become the weakest link in an otherwise migrated chain.
At the same time, quantum resistance is only one of five parallel research strands that the Protocol Cluster pursues across several forks, alongside work on faster finality, on privacy, on state growth and on the zkEVM. Each of these strands competes for the same developer resources and for space in the same forks. The hard elimination of 28 proposals looks less like strictness than like necessity. How robust the deadline really is will show only at the reassessment in January 2027, and at every single fork date beyond it.
"Shipping post-quantum security early is the safe move. It is the strategically responsible move. It is the clearest signal we can send that Ethereum plans to still exist in 50, 100 and 1,000 years." - EF Protocol, Ethereum Foundation Protocol Cluster
