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Ethereum Hegota: The Post-Glamsterdam Fork and Ethereum's 18-Month Three-Fork Pipeline

· 8 min read
Dora Noda
Dora Noda
Software Engineer

For most of Ethereum's history, a new hard fork was a once-a-year event — a slow, heavy release train that shipped whenever the backlog of Ethereum Improvement Proposals grew too large to defer. That era is over. With the naming of Hegota as the upgrade following Glamsterdam, Ethereum's core developers have now publicly committed to three hard forks inside an 18-month window: Fusaka (shipped December 2025), Glamsterdam (H1 2026), and Hegota (H2 2026). Stacked on top of Pectra (May 2025), that is four protocol upgrades in roughly 20 months — the most concentrated execution cadence since The Merge.

The question is no longer whether Ethereum can ship. It is whether this accelerated pipeline can deliver stateless clients, parallel execution, and enshrined MEV fairness fast enough to arrest the 4-year ETH/BTC underperformance before the roadmap wraps in 2027.

The Naming Convention Signals the New Philosophy​

Ethereum upgrade names used to be simple Devcon host cities: Shanghai, Cancun, Prague, Osaka. Glamsterdam broke that pattern with a portmanteau — Glasgow plus Amsterdam — and Hegota extends the convention further by blending a Devcon city (Bogotá, the execution-layer name) with a star (Heze, the consensus-layer name).

The shift matters more than it looks. The old one-city naming reflected one-shot, heavily bundled releases. The new portmanteau naming mirrors the twice-a-year cadence where the execution layer and consensus layer co-evolve on a shared timeline. Core devs have stated plainly that they want to ship smaller, more frequent changes rather than bundle every deferred EIP into a once-yearly megafork. Naming is downstream of that commitment.

What Actually Ships in Glamsterdam (H1 2026)​

Before Hegota can do anything, Glamsterdam has to land. The current scope is ambitious:

  • EIP-7732 — Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS). Today, roughly 80–90% of Ethereum blocks flow through out-of-protocol relays like MEV-Boost. ePBS pulls the builder-proposer split into consensus, eliminating trusted relays and materially reducing the centralization surface around MEV.
  • EIP-7928 — Block-Level Access Lists (BALs). BALs pre-declare the state a transaction will touch, unlocking parallel execution of independent transactions within the same block. Early devnets (Devnet-0 through Devnet-5) have already tested the core logic.
  • Gas repricing and a higher gas limit. Glamsterdam devnets have demonstrated up to a 78% reduction in L1 gas costs, with the gas limit targeted to rise to roughly 200 million. Combined with BAL-driven parallelism, developers are explicitly pointing at a 10,000 TPS ceiling for L1.

The honest caveat: ePBS has proven "trickier than anticipated." Several core contributors have flagged that the H1 target is at risk of slipping into Q3 or Q4 2026. Any slip compresses Hegota's window.

What Hegota Is Really About​

Where Glamsterdam is a scaling-and-MEV fork, Hegota is a node-operator and censorship-resistance fork. Three features dominate the current scope:

Verkle Trees — The Statelessness Unlock​

The headline is a structural swap of Ethereum's state storage from Merkle Patricia Tries to Verkle Trees. Vector commitments produce witnesses whose size stays roughly constant regardless of the tree's width, which flips the economics of running a node:

  • Node storage burden drops by roughly 90%.
  • Witnesses become small enough to ship with blocks, making stateless clients possible for the first time in Ethereum's history.
  • Validator hardware requirements collapse toward commodity, widening the set of participants who can credibly run one.

Stateless clients have been a stated goal since the original post-Merge roadmap. Hegota is the fork where that theoretical goal finally hits mainnet.

FOCIL (EIP-7805) — Enshrined Censorship Resistance​

Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) randomly select 17 participants per block slot, each of whom can force specific transactions into the block. Even if a builder wants to censor — to comply with sanctions, to extract MEV, or for any other reason — a FOCIL committee member can override it.

Paired with ePBS from Glamsterdam, the two upgrades form a coherent story: Glamsterdam decides who builds blocks in-protocol; Hegota decides what must go into them. That pairing is the strongest structural answer Ethereum has produced to the OFAC-era censorship debate.

State and History Expiry​

Alongside Verkle Trees, Hegota introduces mechanisms to safely roll up and archive old, unused state and history, preventing the active-state working set from growing indefinitely. Without this, Verkle Trees alone would only slow state bloat rather than cap it.

The Cadence Question: Can Ethereum Actually Ship Twice a Year?​

The accelerated roadmap is a credibility test. Ethereum's historical track record is mixed — The Merge famously slipped multiple times across multiple years. The new cadence asks core devs to deliver consensus-layer and execution-layer changes, coordinated across five major clients, every six months.

There are early signs it is working. Pectra shipped in May 2025 with account-abstraction primitives and the 2,048 ETH max validator stake. Fusaka followed in December 2025 with PeerDAS — the blob-scaling mechanism that lets validators sample rather than download rollup data, unlocking another order of magnitude of L2 throughput. Both landed roughly on schedule.

But Glamsterdam's ePBS complexity is a real stress test. If H1 slips to Q4, Hegota's H2 2026 slot becomes nearly impossible, and the "twice a year" promise degrades back into "once a year with extra steps." The first half of 2026 is therefore the moment when Ethereum's new shipping culture either proves itself or quietly reverts.

Why L2s Are Watching This More Than Anyone​

The rollup ecosystem now depends on Ethereum's upgrade pipeline in a way that was not true before EIP-4844. Each fork re-prices L2 economics:

  • Fusaka's PeerDAS already expanded blob capacity, pushing L2 data costs down further.
  • Glamsterdam's gas repricing and 200M gas ceiling widens the L1 execution envelope, which matters for withdrawal throughput, force-inclusion transactions, and rollup settlement windows.
  • Hegota's statelessness changes what a "light" L2 sequencer or prover looks like, because anyone can now verify L1 state without holding it.

For Arbitrum, Base, Linea, Optimism, and the rising ZK stack, the three-fork pipeline is effectively a two-year capacity plan for Ethereum DA and settlement. Ecosystem teams are building their own 2026–2027 roadmaps against it.

The ETH/BTC Overhang​

None of this happens in a vacuum. ETH has underperformed BTC for roughly four years, and the market's patience with "technical roadmap" narratives has worn thin. The accelerated cadence is, among other things, a narrative reset: instead of one distant megafork to price in, the market now gets a visible progression of deliverables every six months.

Whether that shifts the ETH/BTC ratio depends on execution. Ship Glamsterdam on time, demonstrate measurable L1 fee reduction and parallel-execution throughput gains, and land Hegota's statelessness before 2027, and the "Ethereum is slow to ship" thesis breaks. Slip two of the three, and it hardens.

The Bottom Line​

Hegota's naming is not, by itself, a product announcement — concrete EIP scoping is not expected until at least February 2026. What it is is a scheduling commitment. Ethereum core developers have now publicly tied themselves to an 18-month window containing three upgrades, each with a coherent thesis: Fusaka scaled data, Glamsterdam will scale execution and enshrine MEV fairness, and Hegota will make nodes cheap and censorship structurally harder.

The moment the last of these ships, Ethereum will have completed the largest protocol transformation since Proof-of-Stake. The next 12 months decide whether that sentence is written as history or as a footnote about ambition that outran delivery.

BlockEden.xyz operates production Ethereum infrastructure across mainnet and major L2s, and tracks each hard-fork devnet and testnet in the pipeline. Explore our Ethereum API services to build against a roadmap designed to scale through 2027.

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