Ethereum upgrade after Glamsburg: What does Hegotá actually decide?

The next major network upgrade for Ethereum is called Glamstam, and the next upgrade is called Hegotá.

Starting from August 16, 2026, a number has been circulated in the industry media: It is said that 66 proposals will enter the discussion stage in Hegotá. If anyone interprets this as meaning that this upgrade will bring 66 new features, they are misreading this number. On that day, in the official planning document maintained by the core developers of Ethereum, there was only one proposal clearly listed and scheduled.

This article will reveal where this numerical difference comes from, teach you how to interpret your planning documents and determine whether a announced feature will actually be deployed to the network. This skill is far more valuable than today's hot headlines. Before Hegotá is scheduled to be activated in 2027, you will read dozens of reports on so-called Ethereum features, a considerable number of which will not end up online. All data in this article comes from our self-statistics on the official EIP document dated August 16, 2026.

What is Hegotá and its place in the Ethereum roadmap

The Ethereum upgrade is technically a hard fork: changes to protocol rules that every node on the network must adopt simultaneously. Any node that does not follow the upgrade will end up on a chain that other nodes no longer track. This is why each such change requires months of negotiation, attempts on the test network, and then a fixed activation point is determined. If you want to review the underlying mechanisms at your own pace, check out our explanation of how Ethereum works.

The names of these upgrades have no descriptive meaning, which makes tracking difficult. Core developers are currently developing Glamstam, and according to planning documents, its mascot is a polar bear. At the same time, preparations for the subsequent upgrade of Hegotá are also in progress. Each project has its own guidance document that records the status of each specific change. For GlamAmsterdam, this file is EIP-7773, created on September 26, 2024. For Hegotá, it is EIP-8081, created on November 11, 2025. The current status of both is "draft".

We discussed what Glamestead includes and why this upgrade is considered significant in our April 5, 2026 article on Glamestead and Ethereum prices. Hegotá is his successor and is currently at a stage of development roughly equivalent to Glamsburg about two years ago.

Why selecting stages is important to you as an ETH holder

It's certainly convenient to ignore it as a developer topic, but it's untenable because a hard fork changes everyone's calculation fees, transaction types, and verifier responsibilities at the same time. Two examples from the list that has been scheduled for inclusion in GlamAmsterdam illustrate the problem: EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 increase the gas cost of writing and reading status data, while EIP-7981 makes accessing lists more expensive. Anyone who uses smart contracts heavily will later pay a different fee.

Pledging ETH will also be affected. EIP-8061 in Glamsterdam-list increases the upper limit on the number of validators who can exit or merge per unit of time. This helps determine how long you need to wait to get your balance back when unwinding a position. If you receive rewards through a service provider and want to understand the currently applicable terms, you can find a side-by-side comparison view in our comparison of pledge platforms; the service provider's payment cycles and agreement rules are two independent operating constraints.

For holders like you who only buy and hold ETH, the calculation is easier: your trading platform needs to update its nodes in a timely manner, otherwise recharges and withdrawals will stagnate around the activation date. This is why exchanges announce maintenance windows before every hard fork. If you want to understand how stable your platform handles such transitions and the fees charged during the process, you can check out an overview in our comparison of cryptocurrency exchanges.

Hard-forked metadocument EIP-8081 is the only binding list

For each upgrade, core developers create a so-called meta-EIP. It contains no technical details, just a list of which proposals are under discussion, which are under review, which have been scheduled, and which have been rejected. The authors of EIP-8081 include Tim Beiko, Alex Stokes, Ansgar Dietrichs, Nixo and Parithosh Jayanthi, and are the same team responsible for the previous upgrade of metadocuments.

This document is important because it is the only place where allocation relationships are binding. A speech on a discussion forum, a speech at a meeting, or a post on Social networks cannot tell if a change will come. The proposal has official status only when someone submits an edit to the metadocument and is accepted. You can view the complete documentation yourself at any time: EIP-8081, Hard Forked Metadata Hegotá.

Statistics as of August 16, 2026: One scheduled EIP, 37 proposals

We extracted the original documents from the source code warehouse of Ethereum developers and counted the entries for each part. The request returned a 200 status code, and the statistical results are as follows.

Status in document| Number of EIPs| One sentence explains that

has been scheduled for inclusion| 1 |The schedule has been determined and it is expected that

will be released and considered for inclusion| 1 |Trying on the testing network without any promises

Rejected to include| 0 |No proposal has been eliminated at present.

Proposed inclusion| 37 |Submitted, not yet evaluated

Total entries| 39 |Total in document

The most telling number on this list is zero. As long as no proposal has been rejected, it means that the screening has not yet begun. This is consistent with industry media accounts that core developers intend to start cutting back at the next meeting. This means for you: Of the 37 proposals submitted, the vast majority will not make it to this upgrade, and today no one can reliably know which ones will remain.

The four stages under EIP-7723 and their actual meanings

The terms in the metadocument are not empty words, but defined states. They are defined in a separate document EIP-7723, titled "Network Upgrade Inclusion Phase", created in June 2024 and currently in "Final Solicitation for Comments." Anyone who can distinguish between these four terms will read any future update report more reliably than most headlines. You can check the definitions here: EIP-7723, Network Upgrade Inclusion Phase.

"Proposal for inclusion" is only an application. To elevate the proposal to this stage, simply submit an edit to the metadocument that adds the entry. No core developer approval is required, no implementation is completed, and no testing is required. The document only records that someone is proposing this change for the upgrade and exists as a contact. Currently, all 37 items under this heading in Hegotá have only gone through the submission step.

"Consider inclusion" is a statement of intent, not a promise. The proposal reaches this stage only after the developer team reviews the proposal and expresses its intention to try it on the test network. EIP-7723 explicitly likens this status to "concept confirmation" in other open source projects, and notes in the same paragraph that this status is not sufficient for deployment on the main network. If the team decides to object, the proposal can be returned from that status to a rejection status at any time.

"Scheduled inclusion" requires verified maturity. Only this stage means that the proposal is moving towards the main network. EIP-7723 lists four tests: the proposal ran stably on the test network for at least a week without serious failures; the specification contained no placeholders or unresolved drafting issues; interactions with other proposals were either minor or verified on the same test network; test coverage was sufficient and there were no differences between software from different vendors. Even so, this allocation remains "unless unforeseen problems arise" and therefore may still be removed from this stage.

rule is worth keeping in mind: Once a metadocument goes from a "draft" state to a "review" state, the proposal list and rejection list are removed. When entering the "final solicitation" state, the list of candidates being reviewed will also disappear. As a result, during completion, the document becomes shorter rather than longer. If you open it again a few months later and suddenly find that there is only a short list left, that is a sign of progress, not a malfunction.

FOCIL (EIP-7805) is the only identified component of Hegotá.

The only proposal that has been identified for inclusion in Hegotá is numbered EIP-7805, abbreviated as FOCIL, and the full name is "Forking Options Mandatory Inclusion List." It was created on November 1, 2024, and listed authors include Thomas Thiery, Francesco D'Amato, Julian Ma, Barnabé Monnot, Terence Tsao, Jacob Kaufmann and Jihoon Song.

The problem FOCIL aims to solve is clearly described in the specification itself: the right to build blocks is currently auctioned off to specialized providers. As a result, a few such builders dominated block production, and the network's ability to resist censorship was affected. In effect, this means that a block builder can filter out a transaction, perhaps because it touches a sanctioned address, and you cannot guarantee that other builders will package it.

The mechanism operates in four steps. During each time period, a group of validators are designated as a committee; each member assembles an inclusion list based on his own view of the transaction pool and distributes it across the network. The proposer and all provers of the next block collect these lists and pass them on. Block producers must include all listed transactions they collect in their blocks. And the prover will vote for the block only if it does so. As a result, a request becomes a condition.

For you as a user, this is the difference between "my transactions may be included" and "my transactions must be included." For verifiers, the list of responsibilities has increased because committee services are added to existing operations. Anyone who has pledged ETH through a service provider should check in advance how the provider handles new agreement responsibilities; the service provider's current terms can be found in our pledge comparisons.

Frame transaction (EIP-8141) carries the privacy direction

The second entry with its own status is EIP-8141, named "Frame Transaction", created on January 29, 2026. The list of authors is unusually long, including Vitalik Buterin, Felix Lange, Yoav Weiss, Alex Forshtat, Dror Tirosh, Shahaf Nacson, Derek Chiang, Stavros Vlachakis and Toni Wahrstätter. In Hegotá, the proposal is in the "consideration for inclusion" stage and is currently the only such entry.

In essence, it introduces a new type of transaction for which validity checks and fee payments can be freely defined. To do this, transactions are broken down into parts called "frames" that in turn handle inspections, fee release, and actual execution. The specification lists several reasons: moving away from currently used elliptic curve programs to programs that are also resistant to quantum computers; decoupling accounts from their keys to enable key changes within the protocol itself; building simpler, and therefore more secure, smart contract accounts with built-in batch processing capabilities; and alternative fee models that do not require an intermediary service provider.

Regarding key changes, if you hold your own coins, it is worth paying attention to. Today, an account is inseparably bound to its key pair; if the key is lost or falls into the hands of someone else, the address is void. Key changes built into the protocol will loosen this logic. Until then, storing keys is still the decisive part, and hardware solutions are still the surest way to achieve this goal; the differences between different devices and their specific manifestations are explained in our hardware wallet comparison.

The actual meaning of "native privacy" in the document

The August 16, 2026 report mentioned three proposals that together aim to achieve privacy applications without intermediaries: frame transactions plus EIP-8250 ("Keyized Nonce for frame transactions") and EIP-8272 ("Recent Root of frame transactions"). This statement comes from a post by developer Toni Wahrstätter.

In the metadocument itself, the situation seems calmer. Of the three proposals, one is in a "consideration for inclusion" status; the other two are in a "proposal for inclusion" status and therefore have not yet undergone any review. The fourth entry directly related to this topic, EIP-8182,"Private ETH and ERC-20 Transfers," also appears only in the proposal list. Drawn in headlines as a privacy-driven package, in official documents, it contains one reviewed and three uncensored entries.

This distinction is not nitpicking. Whether you can rely on a feature two years later depends on this. Also, this can be verified in thirty seconds because the document is public.

The media said there were 66 proposals, and there were 39 entries in the document

This raises the question of where the number 66 came from when there were only 39 entries in the document. On August 16, 2026, two industry media outlets, Cointelegraph and crypto.news, reported on this, both of which quoted the same post by the above-mentioned developer on a Social networks. We are unable to view this post ourselves, so we hereby expressly quote this number as a media report. Only values from metadocuments have been verified and counted by us.

The most likely reason for the difference lies in the different objects of their statistics. A metadocument contains only what someone has formally submitted. There are more proposals circulating in developer conference calls and discussion forums that have not yet taken this step. So both numbers may be correct, just measuring different things. There is a simple test for you as a reader: A number without a phase description is meaningless. For each upgrade report, first ask how many proposals have been scheduled, and then continue reading.

Using Glamestead as a ruler: 19 scheduled EIPs and 41 rejected EIPs

Just how strictly screening will ultimately reduce the number, look at Hegotá's previous upgrades. The same statistical method was applied to Glamestead document EIP-7773 dated August 16, 2026, resulting in 19 proposals with fixed dates, 7 other proposals that fell into the secondary category of network protocols and analytics, and 41 proposals that were explicitly rejected. In other words, Glamestead ultimately eliminated more proposals than it adopted.

Status| Glamsterdam (EIP-7773) |Hegotá (EIP-8081)

Scheduled for inclusion| 19 |1

Consider inclusion| No separate list| 1

Inclusion rejected| 41 |0

Proposed inclusion| No separate list| 37

Other categories| 7 |0

Among the scheduled Glamestead proposals, some changes are included with significant impact, such as EIP-7732 on anchoring the separation of proposers and block builders in the protocol, EIP-7928 on block-level access lists, and EIP-7954 to increase the allowed size of smart contracts. Which of them will eventually be activated cannot be determined until it is activated.

One detail on the edge is particularly telling. Three proposals that were rejected in Glamestead resurface in the Hegotá document as proposals: EIP-7668 on removing Bloom filters, EIP-7819 on the SETDELEGATE instruction, and EIP-7979 on new virtual machine calls and return instructions. This is clearly allowed. EIP-7723 stipulates that a refusal only applies to a single upgrade and does not prevent you from trying again in the next upgrade. Therefore, a rejection is not the final judgment on an idea, but just a decision on a date.

Schedule: Glamstam 2026, Hegotá 2027, neither has a fixed date

In terms of dates, the document is deliberately restrained, which is the most honest part of the process. Both meta EIPs contain a table for testing network and main network activation times. In both documents, every field in the table is empty. A note is noted below the table stating that these rows will be filled once the developer team determines the schedule.

The news that does exist comes from reports and the project's public roadmap: Glamsterdam is expected to arrive at the main network in the second half of 2026, and core developers have targeted Hegotá for the following year. Cointelegraph said the next developer conference call will be held at 14:00 UTC on Monday. We were unable to verify the date based on primary sources, so we quoted it as a media report.

For your plan, this means that there are currently no dates you can rely on, and any reports that mention specific dates should prompt you to verify them. You can read about how Ethereum's price discussions are independent of this development in our Ethereum analysis of June 27, 2026; this article deliberately does not include any statements about future prices.

How to track the Ethereum upgrade filtering process yourself without waiting for headlines

The good news about this topic is that you don't have to rely on anyone. The document is public, short, and can be checked in minutes. The steps for one inspection are as follows:

Open EIP-8081 and ignore the body for now. What matters is the chapter title and the number of articles below it.

Count the number of entries under "Scheduled Inclusion". This figure is the core content of every upgrade report.

Check if there is anything under "Inclusion Rejected". If the list is growing, screening has begun. If it remains empty, everything remains up in the air.

Quickly check the EIP-7773 to understand Hegotá 's chronological upgrades and its current status.

Check the editing status at the top of the document. Changing from "draft" to "review" means that the list of proposals has been removed and things become more specific.

View the activation schedule. As long as empty fields are displayed there, there is no agreed date, no matter how you write it elsewhere.

After completing two such inspections, the third one took less than five minutes. The benefits are huge: You can locate any reports about upcoming Ethereum features in a short period of time without having to blindly believe them.

Limitations of this statistics: Questions not answered by the metadocument

In order to let you understand the scope of application of the data in this article, the following are clear limitations. This statistics is a snapshot of August 16, 2026. Each accepted edit to a document changes the value, and this happens several times a week during the active screening phase.

The document also does not state to what extent implementation is progressing in individual software products. This information exists in test network reports and developer meeting minutes, not in meta-EIP. It also did not say which of the 37 proposals submitted had any chance; anyone who claimed to know this was interpreting rather than reporting.

As mentioned above, we did not verify the number 66 at its original source. Finally: Network upgrades are not price events. Neither the number of proposals nor their status are related to the value of ETH, and this article clearly does not derive any expectations from them.

Positioning the Ethereum upgrade: Key points

Count the proposals that have been scheduled, not the proposals that are discussed. Currently, this number is one in Hegotá and 19 in Glamestead. Everything else is just intention and determines nothing. If you see technological development as an opportunity to build or adjust your position, please first compare the fees and trading pairs of each service provider in our exchange comparison.

Before each hard fork, check how your service provider responds. Maintaining windows, suspending withdrawals and changing exit periods have an impact in practice faster than any agreement change. This is especially important if you receive rewards through a service provider; you can find the service provider's terms in the pledge comparison.

Keep the custody of assets in your own hands. As long as there is no key change feature in the protocol, everything depends on your ability to securely store your keys. Which devices differ, and what they are, are explained in our hardware wallet comparison.

(As of August 16, 2026. This article does not constitute investment advice. Price and fee structures are subject to change; please verify terms with your service provider before purchasing.)