Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin said PeerDAS marked the start of Ethereum’s transition “from being just a blockchain to being something much more powerful.” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Ethereum’s Hegotá upgrade could be the network’s last “normal” fork before development shifts toward technologies that include recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, optimized consensus and quantum-safe cryptography. On Sunday, Buterin said Hegotá, which is planned for 2027, is likely to be the final upgrade whose features and technology would still be recognizable to someone familiar with Ethereum in 2015. He said PeerDAS, which allows nodes to verify data availability by sampling portions of data rather than downloading everything, marked the beginning of Ethereum’s transition “from being just a blockchain to being something much more powerful.” Read more
Ethereum’s Hegotá upgrade will center on FOCIL and Frame Transactions as developers weigh dozens of other proposed changes for inclusion. The Ethereum Foundation has identified two “must ship” proposals for the Hegotá upgrade, prioritizing censorship resistance and more flexible account authentication as it narrows the fork’s scope. The ranking evaluated 62 proposed Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), drawing on input from roughly 60 researchers and engineers across the Foundation’s Protocol cluster. It marks the first time the Foundation’s Protocol cluster has published a unified view of proposed EIPs rather than separate opinions from individual teams. The two must-ship proposals are EIP-7805, known as FOCIL, and EIP-8141, or Frame Transactions, which the Foundation designated as the consensus and execution-layer headliners for Hegotá. Read more
The Hegotá upgrade aims to introduce more native privacy for Ethereum applications. Ethereum developers are currently reviewing 66 proposals to narrow them down as part of scoping the next major Ethereum upgrade, Hegotá, with several proposals aimed at bringing more privacy capabilities into the protocol. FOCIL is currently the only Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) scheduled for inclusion in the upgrade. Frame Transactions (EIP-8141), Keyed Nonces (EIP-8250) and Recent Roots for Frame Transactions (EIP-8272) should also be included to “unlock native privacy, allowing privacy apps to work without having to rely on intermediaries,” wrote Ethereum Foundation contributor Toni Wahrstätter in a Sunday X post. FOCIL, short for Fork-choice enforced inclusion lists, seeks to allow a committee of validators to force pending transactions into blocks to boost the network’s censorship resistance, while the other proposals could provide protocol primitives for privacy applications. Read more