Approximately 60 contributors from 16 working groups cast 397 individual grades to produce the ranked list. Nine client and research teams agreed to publish the results as a single consolidated document rather than separate per-team assessments, a departure from past practice. Designating two EIPs as effectively indispensable at this early a planning stage is historically unusual: in prior upgrade cycles, no single EIP has been labeled indispensable before client discussions had advanced considerably further.

The S-Tier designations align with priorities laid out in the Ethereum Foundation's February 2026 Protocol Priorities document, which names three explicit pillars: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1. Censorship resistance and user experience at the base layer, the areas addressed by the two S-Tier proposals, fall directly under the second and third of those pillars. Two formal retrospectives on Glamsterdam explicitly fed into the tier list's methodology and help explain why conditions attached to lower-tier proposals are unusually granular this cycle.

What the Tiers Mean

The ranking system runs from S (must ship) through A (high priority), B (on the bubble with conditions), C (deprioritized), DFI (declined for inclusion in Hegotá), and TBD (deliberately left unranked pending additional data). Grades are scored on a cardinal scale: S=4, A=3, B=2, C=1, DFI=0. Two EIPs, 8368 and 8372, were placed in the TBD category pending mainnet data from Glamsterdam before a ranking can be assigned.

Grades reflect what the team calls "steelman" positions: the strongest case for each EIP after group deliberation, not a raw average of individual scores. Abstentions do not count against a proposal.

Fifteen EIPs sit at A-Tier, including proposals that ship as bundled packages alongside the two S-Tier entries. EIP-7805 must be accompanied by EIP-8369 (VOPS Profiles), while EIP-8141 ships with EIPs 8250 and 8272. A third A-Tier cluster, the Extension package comprising EIPs 7906, 8298, and 8151, coordinates the network's k1-key retirement strategy. The bundling across all three packages is intentional: partial implementations would leave the network in an inconsistent state. Eight B-Tier proposals carry explicit conditions for advancement, with EIP-8198 (Quick Slots) requiring full specifications, a working prototype, ecosystem assessment, and consensus compatibility approval before it can move up. Twenty-eight EIPs were declined for Hegotá, with written rationale for each.

The Two S-Tier Proposals

FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists) addresses a structural problem in how Ethereum blocks are currently built. As block production has increasingly concentrated among specialized builders operating in MEV (maximal extractable value) supply chains, the ability of any single entity to filter out specific transactions has grown. FOCIL counters this by randomly selecting 17 validators each slot to construct inclusion lists. Attesters, the validators who confirm a block is valid, will only approve a block that contains transactions from all stored inclusion lists, making selective transaction exclusion a protocol-level violation rather than a commercial choice.

Vitalik Buterin described the combined effect of FOCIL and Frame Transactions in a piece published by Decrypt: "With FOCIL and 8141 together, anything, including smart wallet txs, gas sponsored txs, and even privacy protocol txs, can be included on-chain through one of 17 different actors." In a separate remark in the same article, Buterin said that "Ethereum is going hard" on this direction.

Not everyone is convinced. Developer and critic Ameen Soleimani raised a specific concern about the sanctions-filtering dimension of FOCIL's design: "When you create an EIP to solve the problem of 'filtering out transactions with sanctioned addresses' and your solution is 'to allow validators to impose constraints on builders by force-including transactions in their blocks'... we have a problem, a big problem." Soleimani also warned that developers are "either being naive or reckless if they don't recognize potential validator risks" in the design.

Frame Transactions, co-authored by Buterin, introduce a new transaction type that breaks a single transaction into up to 64 programmable segments called frames. Each frame operates in one of three modes: standard execution, read-only validation, or execution within the sender's own context. The practical result is native support for account abstraction, gas sponsorship (where a dApp or third party covers transaction fees on a user's behalf), and atomic batching of multiple operations. All three functions currently require external infrastructure and workarounds.

Notable Rejections

Among the 28 declined proposals, EIP-8363 (Tapered Issuance Burn) drew the clearest statement from the Protocol cluster. The team rejected it unanimously, noting that issuance policy touches every staker and must go through a broader community process rather than being decided during fork scoping. EIP-7645 (Alias ORIGIN) was declined for breaking assumptions in already-deployed contracts with no security benefit. EIP-8142 (Block-in-Blobs) was turned down because it would deepen the network's dependency on KZG cryptography, which conflicts with the longer-term plan to migrate away from it. EIP-2488 (Deprecate CALLCODE) was also declined, on grounds of insufficient fork urgency and risk of breaking application-layer contracts.

A DFI designation is not a permanent rejection. Champions of declined proposals may re-propose for subsequent forks; DFI means out of scope for Hegotá specifically, not out of scope for Ethereum. Separately, the unanimous rejection of EIP-8363 carries a specific regional consequence: solo stakers, who make up a disproportionate share of validators in some African communities, will not face issuance policy changes in Hegotá.

Regional Stakes

The practical implications of both S-Tier EIPs land with particular weight in emerging markets. Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value over the past year, a 52% increase year-over-year, according to Blockchain Statistics 2026. South Asia saw on-chain transaction volume grow 80% over the same period, reaching approximately $300 billion, with India's crypto adoption rate standing at 13.5%, per BlockchainReporter.

In both regions, the requirement that users hold ETH specifically to pay gas fees ranks among the most-cited barriers to broader Ethereum adoption. ETH Safari events and Ecofin Agency reporting have identified this friction as the single largest obstacle to consumer-facing application growth in African markets, where gas costs are characterized as prohibitively expensive and unpredictable for everyday users.

EIP-8141's gas sponsorship mechanism would allow a user in Dhaka or Lagos to transact using a stablecoin without maintaining a separate ETH balance. The upgrade also builds on existing regional tooling rather than requiring fresh infrastructure investment: several South Asian neobanks and fintech platforms have already deployed EIP-7702-based smart accounts introduced in the Pectra upgrade, and Frame Transactions extend those accounts' capabilities rather than replacing them.

FOCIL carries a different kind of relevance in jurisdictions where regulatory pressure on transaction intermediaries is a live concern. In South Asian regulatory contexts, state-level censorship concerns around transaction filtering have been documented, while several African countries are navigating active regulatory flux around crypto. A protocol that guarantees inclusion regardless of builder preferences provides a baseline guarantee of permissionless access that application developers in these markets can rely on.

What Comes Next

Hegotá follows Glamsterdam in Ethereum's ongoing upgrade sequence. The current pipeline runs from Pectra (2025) through Fusaka (2025) to Glamsterdam (Q4 2026, undergoing public testing on the Plataberget testnet since August 17) and on to Hegotá (targeted for 2027). Ethereum has maintained a biannual fork cadence since Fusaka. The name Hegotá blends "Bogotá," the host city of Devcon 7, with "Heze," a star in the constellation Virgo.

Two EIPs (8368 and 8372) were deliberately left unranked pending mainnet data from Glamsterdam. The Protocol cluster has set September 10 as a deadline for client teams to register their preferences. An open AMA on r/ethereum is scheduled for September 16 at 2pm UTC, with a specific invitation to EIP champions whose proposals landed below A-Tier to submit questions. For African and South Asian builder teams with active interest in B-Tier proposals, the September 10 preference deadline and the September 16 AMA represent the primary entry points for engaging with the process before scope is locked.