Ethereum developers have scheduled Frame Transactions, formally known as EIP-8141, for inclusion in the Hegotá upgrade planned for 2027. The decision was made during the Aug. 27 developer call, moving the proposal to “Scheduled for Inclusion” and placing it in Ethereum’s official upgrade path rather than leaving it as a standalone candidate. The feature separates the account authorizing a transaction from the account responsible for paying gas, allowing applications, wallets or other accounts to cover network fees on behalf of users. That means an end user could interact with decentralized applications without directly holding ETH, even though Ethereum would continue to receive fees in ETH at the protocol level.
The proposal also supports atomic execution of related operations and more flexible account authorization rules. For example, a token swap could combine an approval and a trade so that a failed transaction does not leave an unnecessary token allowance active. Vitalik Buterin, one of the proposal’s 10 authors, noted on Sept. 5 that a “lot of important progress on Frames (EIP-8141) has been quietly happening over the last few months.” The upgrade is expected to follow Glamsterdam, another major Ethereum upgrade expected later in 2026.
In parallel, a privacy-focused technical issue has emerged. The current EIP-8141 draft caps signature checks and execution in the initial validation phase at 100,000 gas, a limit designed to contain node workload and denial-of-service exposure. A Sept. 2 benchmark by mmjahanara reports that an optimized Groth16 proof verifier requires 190,628 gas, with its cryptographic pairing check alone accounting for 181,000 gas. Full modeled minimums reach 211,828 gas for a single-note spend and 351,828 gas for an eight-note spend. The benchmark author recommends at least 250,000 gas for typical optimized transactions, but that recommendation has not been adopted.
A Sept. 5 proposal submitted by contributor AnkushinDaniil would turn the existing validation maximum into a common floor: nodes would still be required to propagate qualifying transactions within the 100,000-gas allowance, while capable nodes could accept more expensive privacy transactions locally. The proposal remains under review and would not guarantee wider network support. For privacy designs such as Tornado Cash and RAILGUN, replacing off-chain relayers with public submission requires proofs that nodes will accept and pass along. The benchmark’s accounting differs from the current EIP-8250 companion draft, and CryptoSlate has not independently rerun the numbers, but the verifier’s execution-cost gap remains. EIP-8250 also preserves one pending public-mempool transaction per sender, another constraint for privacy designs sharing an address.
