Ethereum developers agreed earlier this month on the name and approximate timing of the network’s second major upgrade scheduled for 2026, settling on “Hegota” as the next milestone on the blockchain 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 sequence tentatively puts Hegota into 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, in which major contributors aim to ship network changes more frequently rather than bundling a large number of updates into releases that occur roughly once a year. That change comes after developers faced criticism from parts of the Ethereum community earlier this year, with some users and builders arguing that the protocol’s development was lagging behind the network’s rapid growth and increasing demands.
The promoters are expected to finalize the full scope of Glamsterdam at their next meeting in early January. As a result, major headline changes for Hegota, formally known as Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP), are not expected to be announced until at least February. Even so, the first speculations have already begun about what the update could include.
A likely source of potential Hegota features is Glamsterdam’s deferred work. In previous Ethereum updates, EIPs that failed to launch due to time or complexity constraints were often pushed to the next update, and developers are expecting 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 could significantly reduce hardware requirements for node operators, improving decentralization by making it easier for more participants to run nodes.
As with previous updates, the name “Hegota” follows the Ethereum convention of combining a Devcon host city with a star name. In this case, the name is derived from “Bogotá”, the execution layer update, and “Heze”, the consensus layer update.
“Fusaka shipped PeerDAS in addition to a host of minor features and major features of Glamsterdam will include block-level access lists and the enshrined separation between proposer and constructor. We now begin to outline the subsequent update: Hegota,” the Ethereum Foundation said in a recent blog post.
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