Ethereum's next big upgrade has 66 proposals, including a major privacy fix

Ethereum developers are weighing whether the blockchain's next major upgrade, Hegotá, should make private transactions easier to build without relying on intermediaries.

Like other blockchains, Ethereum addresses are permanent and maintain a running balance, which means anyone can inspect an address's full history and see what it holds. That creates difficulties for payroll, treasury operations, and others who do not want their finances publicly visible.

Until now, that problem has largely been handled by applications built on top of Ethereum. A package now under review would move part of that functionality into the network itself.

The main proposal is Frame Transactions, also known as Ethereum Improvement Proposal 8141 (EIP-8141). It would allow an account to define how a transaction is approved, executed, and paid for, instead of requiring every user to follow the same setup.

For ordinary users, that could mean a wallet in which someone else pays the fee, multiple actions are combined into a single payment, or the cryptography used to approve a transaction changes without requiring a move to a new account.

The effort to loosen Ethereum's account rules predates this upgrade. ERC-4337, introduced in 2023, delivered account abstraction through a separate mempool and intermediaries known as bundlers, a design chosen so that Ethereum's core protocol would not need to change. Frame Transactions would instead move that kind of flexibility into the protocol itself.

Toni Wahrstätter, an Ethereum Foundation researcher and a co-author of the proposal, outlined the case for it in an X post as developers began narrowing Hegotá's scope.

Ethereum's next year's upgrade, Hegotá, is being scoped right now. 66 proposals are on the table and over the next few core dev calls, this list will be narrowed down to the EIPs that get implementations, devnets, testnets, and a realistic chance of shipping in 2027. What… — Toni Wahrstätter ⟠ (@nero_eth) August 16, 2026

Ethereum's next year's upgrade, Hegotá, is being scoped right now. 66 proposals are on the table and over the next few core dev calls, this list will be narrowed down to the EIPs that get implementations, devnets, testnets, and a realistic chance of shipping in 2027. What…

Private payment systems on Ethereum can already conceal information using cryptographic proofs, but bringing those transactions onchain still requires additional infrastructure, and some designs route users through relayers, outside services that submit the transaction on their behalf.

Privacy tooling on the network has also drawn outside scrutiny: the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned the Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash in 2022 and removed it from the sanctions list in 2025 after a U.S. appeals court ruled the agency had overstepped its authority.

Frame Transactions is one of 66 proposals being considered for Hegotá, which is expected to follow this year's Glamsterdam release and ship in 2027. Developers will now determine which proposals are realistic to build, test, and release on schedule. Upgrades of this kind ship as hard forks, coordinated changes that node operators, exchanges, and wallet providers must adopt together, which is part of why the bar includes working implementations, devnets, and testnets before anything ships.

Two related proposals address the problems that can arise when many people transact privately through the same account. Keyed Nonces, or EIP-8250, would let transactions use separate counters instead of queueing behind a single one, so a delayed transaction would no longer hold up those behind it.

Separately, EIP-8272 would allow a transaction to prove itself against a recent cryptographic record without relying on information that could change while it waits.

Together, the three proposals would reduce some of the outside infrastructure currently needed by privacy applications.

Ethereum itself would not become private. Sending ETH between two normal addresses would remain visible as it is today. The privacy would still be provided by applications, but those applications would need less outside machinery to function.

Frame Transactions is not guaranteed to be included in the upgrade. Although it has been marked as considered for Hegotá, that does not amount to approval.