The Ethereum development community has officially scheduled the Hegota upgrade for late 2026, marking a pivotal step in the network's long-term strategy to address scalability and state growth. The decision was finalized during the All Core Devs Execution call on December 18, 2025, confirming a move toward a biannual upgrade cadence.
The Hegota upgrade is a coordinated effort across Ethereum's consensus (Heze) and execution (Bogota) layers. Its primary focus is tackling state bloat, a persistent issue, through the planned introduction of Verkle Trees. This new data structure will replace current state storage mechanisms, enabling far smaller cryptographic proofs. This technological shift is foundational for enabling stateless clients—nodes that can verify blocks without storing the full historical state.
According to developer estimates, this could reduce node storage requirements by up to 90%, dramatically lowering the cost and hardware barriers to running a full node, thereby strengthening Ethereum's decentralization and censorship resistance. Complementary features like state expiry mechanisms are also under consideration to further reduce long-term data accumulation.
Hegota follows the Glamsterdam upgrade, slated for the first half of 2026. Glamsterdam is focused on execution-layer performance, targeting parallel transaction execution, a higher gas limit, and throughput potentially approaching 10,000 transactions per second. While Hegota's timing is set, its final scope remains open. Core developers plan to determine the headline Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) by February 2026, with a proposal window from January 8 to February 4.
The 2026 roadmap reveals a two-track approach: expanding rollup data capacity via blobs (enhanced by the recent Fusaka upgrade) and pushing base-layer execution limits. A critical dependency for significant gas limit increases is the transition of validators from re-executing blocks to verifying ZK execution proofs. The Ethereum Foundation's "Realtime Proving" roadmap outlines a staged adoption path for this, targeting proof sizes under 300 KiB and 128-bit security.
This shift introduces validator risks, including new failure modes. Research on the "free option problem" associated with enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS, part of Glamsterdam) estimates option exercise in about 0.82% of blocks on average, highlighting liveness concerns under stress. The practical scaling of the network hinges on the development of a robust and decentralized proving market for ZK proofs.
