Ethereum developers earlier this month agreed on the name and rough timing of the network’s second major upgrade planned for 2026, settling on “Hegota” as the next milestone in the blockchain’s development roadmap.
Hegota will follow “Glamsterdam,” Ethereum’s next major upgrade, which is currently expected to roll out in the first half of 2026. That sequencing tentatively places Hegota in the second half of the year and continues a faster cadence of protocol upgrades than Ethereum has historically maintained.
The decision reflects a relatively new approach to Ethereum development, where core contributors aim to push network changes more frequently, rather than lumping together a large number of upgrades into releases that happen roughly once a year. This shift 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.
Developers are expected to finalize the full scope of Glamsterdam at their next meeting in early January. As a result, no major header changes – formally known as Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) – are expected to be announced for Hegota until at least February. Still, early speculation has already begun about what the upgrade could include.
A likely source of potential Hegota features is deferred work from Glamsterdam. In previous Ethereum upgrades, EIPs that couldn’t make it to a release due to time or complexity constraints were often pushed to the following upgrade, and developers expect a similar dynamic this time around.
Initial discussions around Hegota have focused on Verkle Trees, a newer data structure designed to help Ethereum nodes store and verify large amounts of data more efficiently. If implemented, Verkle Trees can significantly reduce the hardware requirements for node operators, improving decentralization by making it easier for multiple participants to run nodes.
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 shipped PeerDAS with a myriad of minor features, and Glamsterdam’s key features will include block-level access lists and enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation. Now we’re starting to outline the next upgrade: Hegota,” the Ethereum Foundation said in a recent blog post.
Read more: Ethereum’s ‘Glamsterdam’ upgrade aims to fix MEV fairness
