The Ethereum Foundation's Protocol cluster has published a single graded ranking of all 62 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) submitted for Hegotá, the network upgrade slated to follow Glamsterdam. It is the first time the group has spoken with one voice on a fork, rather than leaving each team to publish its own opinions. The list now serves as the reference point for which features are locked in and which are on the chopping block. For outside observers — client teams, application developers, and infrastructure operators who plan upgrades months ahead — a single consolidated signal marks a shift in how Ethereum's decentralized development process communicates its roadmap.

S means must ship, DFI means declined

The tier list, posted on Monday, September 7 alongside a companion piece on cluster priorities (blog.ethereum.org/2026/09/07/protocol-hegota-eips), sorts each proposal into bands that carry hard delivery commitments.

An S grade means a feature defines the fork and that the schedule bends before its scope does. An A grade means the feature is expected to ship and can only be cut after every S item is safe. B-tier proposals are admitted one at a time, and most come with three requirements: a prototype, a sign-off, and a settled specification. C-tier proposals fall below the line without being disqualified, followed by DFI, which stands for "declined for inclusion." A DFI can be assigned for reasons such as security risk or a threat to a later milestone. A separate TBD band holds proposals back until mainnet data can answer questions the cluster cannot answer today.

Only FOCIL, filed as EIP-7805, earned a clean S. FOCIL — fork-choice enforced inclusion lists — has been discussed in Ethereum research circles for years as a way to counter the influence of a small set of dominant block builders. The proposal enables any user to get an eligible transaction included without relying on centralized block builders. It also drew a unanimous top grade at full participation and is described as the locked-in consensus-layer headliner.

How did 60 Ethereum researchers produce 397 grades?

Roughly 60 researchers and engineers took part in the scoring process that determined what to prioritize. They were organized into nine teams in addition to individual domain experts, and together they filled out 16 contribution templates. Twelve of those templates provided actual tier grades, and several were used only on the EIPs where contributors held deep expertise.

The teams that make up the Protocol cluster produced 397 grades across the 62 proposals, an average of 6.4 per EIP. The most contested items received as many as nine grades apiece. Contributors carried out the scoring independently. In its blog post, the Protocol cluster noted that Geth, as an execution-layer client, will still ship its own standalone list. That carve-out reflects how Ethereum upgrades actually ship: multiple independent client teams must each implement and agree on the final contents before a fork goes live on mainnet.

The whole thing points at quantum resistance

The grades are part of a longer-term goal spelled out in the post on the cluster's priorities (blog.ethereum.org/2026/09/07/protocol-priorities). This includes making Ethereum's base layer quantum-resistant across execution, consensus, and data by December 2029. That date matches migration targets set independently by Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft. The concern is specific: a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break the elliptic-curve cryptography that secures Ethereum addresses and signatures today, which is why the industry-wide migration conversation matters to blockchains as much as to web infrastructure.

The Ethereum Foundation calls planning for a 2030 "Q-day" a deliberately aggressive assumption. It noted that the most credible estimates put the arrival of cryptography-breaking quantum computers later than that, if such machines arrive at all. The Foundation also said it will treat the self-imposed deadline as non-negotiable at least until a January 2027 reassessment with outside experts.

To reach that target after a December 2026 Glamsterdam launch, the Foundation would need to move at an average pace of 7.2 months per fork through a fifth upgrade called L*.

The cluster's work is now organized around five overlapping research arcs: fast finality, post-quantum, privacy, state, and zkEVM.

When will the work on privacy begin?

Privacy has been a major focus of the Foundation, and co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been a leading voice in advocating for privacy on Ethereum. In their post, the Protocol cluster stated: "We believe this work should start in Hegota to deliver native, trustless, censorship resistant private transactions on Ethereum L1."

The cluster added that post-quantum privacy can then arrive at scale. It also noted that Hegotá is not the post-quantum fork; rather, it is the fork that will determine how soon that post-quantum upgrade happens. The Protocol cluster says implementation work by client teams can realistically start in late Q4 2026.