Ethereum developers have settled on two core priorities for the upcoming Hegotá network upgrade, selecting FOCIL and Frame Transactions as the foundational changes that will anchor the hard fork. The designation of these proposals as "must ship" items comes as the broader development community continues evaluating dozens of additional Ethereum Improvement Proposals for possible inclusion Cointelegraph.
FOCIL, which stands for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, represents a mechanism designed to strengthen transaction inclusion guarantees and mitigate certain classes of censorship risks on the network. Frame Transactions, meanwhile, introduce a structural change to how transactions are processed, potentially enabling more flexible execution environments. Together, these two proposals form the technical backbone around which other Hegotá features will be evaluated.
The Frame Transactions mechanism has attracted particular attention for its potential to enable gas-fee abstraction—allowing users to interact with Ethereum without directly holding ETH for transaction fees. A related proposal, EIP-8141, has been under development since January 2026 and approaches this problem from a security angle as well, with its authors positioning it initially as a defense against quantum computing threats Decrypt.
EIP-8141's dual-purpose design reflects growing recognition within the Ethereum research community that infrastructure improvements should address multiple concerns simultaneously. By enabling alternative payment mechanisms for gas fees, the proposal could lower barriers to entry for users who wish to interact with Ethereum-based applications without maintaining ETH balances, while its cryptographic properties aim to future-proof certain operations against quantum adversaries.
The gas abstraction landscape faces practical constraints, however. Privacy-focused implementations using Frame Transactions have encountered resource limitations during testing. One studied privacy proof currently requires approximately 200,000 gas units—nearly double the 100,000-gas allowance proposed for the shared validation framework CryptoSlate. This discrepancy highlights the tension between ambitious cryptographic goals and the network's operational parameters.
The open Frames change would permit additional validation work at individual nodes, creating a pathway for more computationally intensive operations outside the standard block gas limit. Researchers are now examining whether privacy proofs can be optimized to fit within existing constraints or if the proposed gas allowance itself requires adjustment to accommodate these use cases.
These parallel development tracks—core protocol upgrades alongside user-experience improvements—illustrate Ethereum's evolving approach to network development. Rather than treating scalability, privacy, and accessibility as separate initiatives, Hegotá's design process increasingly treats them as interconnected components requiring coordinated solutions.