Ethereum’s next major protocol upgrade is taking shape around two priorities that could materially influence how the network handles users, transactions and censorship resistance.
The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol cluster has ranked 62 proposed Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for the Hegotá upgrade, identifying Fork-choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) and Frame Transactions as the two highest-priority proposals.
The ranking is significant because Hegotá is not being designed simply as another collection of incremental Ethereum improvements.
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Instead, the process reflects a broader attempt to strengthen the network’s foundations while making accounts more flexible and transactions harder to suppress. The Foundation said its assessment involved roughly 60 researchers and engineers across its Protocol teams, producing a unified view of which proposals deserve priority.
FOCIL, or EIP-7805, occupies the consensus-layer spotlight. Its purpose is to strengthen transaction inclusion by preventing a single block builder from quietly excluding valid transactions. Under the proposed mechanism, validators can collectively enforce inclusion requirements.
Meaning builders would have less freedom to censor transactions that users have successfully propagated to the network. That matters because Ethereum’s block-building ecosystem has become increasingly specialized. Professional builders compete to construct economically valuable blocks, while validators select proposals.
This architecture has improved efficiency, but it also creates a potential concentration point. FOCIL is intended to add another layer of protection, ensuring that transaction inclusion is not determined solely by whoever controls block construction.
The second Hegotá centerpiece is EIP-8141, known as Frame Transactions. This proposal takes Ethereum toward native account abstraction, allowing transaction validation, execution and fee payment to become more programmable at the protocol level.
Instead of requiring every user account to operate around the traditional externally owned account model, applications could build more flexible account experiences.
The implications extend beyond convenience. Frame Transactions could support sponsored transactions, alternative signature systems and more flexible payment arrangements.
It also creates a pathway toward stronger cryptographic resilience, including the ability for accounts to adopt new signature schemes without requiring a separate hard fork for every future cryptographic change. The combination of FOCIL and Frames is therefore particularly important.
One proposal focuses on whether a transaction can reach the chain; the other changes how users authorize, execute and pay for transactions. Together, they address two different weaknesses in Ethereum’s transaction architecture.
Other proposals remain under consideration. The Foundation classified 15 proposals as expected to ship, while eight B-tier proposals have additional requirements and seven C-tier proposals sit below the inclusion line. Twenty-eight proposals were declined, while two remain undecided pending further evidence.
This filtering process illustrates an increasingly disciplined approach to Ethereum upgrades. Rather than maximizing the number of features included in every fork, developers are emphasizing security, testing and long-term protocol coherence.
The Foundation has explicitly indicated that the two Hegotá headliners must be delivered together safely, with their interaction tested as part of the upgrade’s core engineering work. For Ethereum users and developers, the direction is consequential.
Hegotá, currently targeted for 2027, could make the network more resistant to censorship while moving accounts toward a more programmable model.
The ranking of 62 proposals ultimately says as much about what Ethereum will not ship as what it will.
Hegotá is emerging as a focused effort to reinforce Ethereum’s core guarantees: users should be able to transact, accounts should become more flexible, and no individual intermediary should gain excessive power over what reaches the blockchain.