Ethlabs has withdrawn its Quick Slots proposal from Ethereum’s Hegotá upgrade while urging core developers to make post-quantum and “post-AI” security the organising objective for 2027. The proposal, known as “pqai27,” would also reconsider the planned inclusion of FOCIL and could reshape the order and structure of the upgrade, although no roadmap changes have been approved.

The position was set out in an 11 November post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, published after Ethlabs spent Devcon week in Mumbai with Ethereum core developers. The post contains two decisions with different status: Ethlabs can withdraw Quick Slots, which it developed, but its broader request to reorganise Hegotá remains a position paper until the core developer process adopts it.

Ethlabs is a nonprofit research group launched in June by five former Ethereum Foundation researchers. It has received funding from Bitmine, SharpLink and Consensys founder Joe Lubin. The group wrote Quick Slots and spent the autumn campaigning for the proposal, so it can remove the proposal from consideration itself. It cannot unilaterally change the Ethereum roadmap.

Ethlabs defines post-quantum security as cryptography that a sufficiently large quantum computer could not break. “Post-AI” is the group’s own term and covers two related concerns. The first is cryptography based on as few mathematical assumptions as possible, because Ethlabs argues that AI systems capable of solving open mathematical problems could eventually expose weaknesses that researchers did not anticipate. The second is client software hardened with and against models that discover bugs at scale. The post qualifies the second use of “post-AI” with “plausibly” and does not claim that the resulting design would be provably safe.

Hegotá is scheduled to follow Glamsterdam, which Ethlabs says should proceed as planned. The question raised by the group concerns Hegotá’s contents, not a delay to Glamsterdam.

Two targets within the 2027 objective

Ethlabs divides its proposal into two levels. Describing the plan simply as “quantum-safe Ethereum by 2027” would therefore overstate what is being proposed.

The first level, targeted for Hegotá, is pqai-ready. Under this target:

• Consensus would use post-quantum cryptography.
• Every account would have a route for migrating to post-quantum keys.
• The network would retain the capacity delivered by Glamsterdam.
• If current cryptography were broken, Ethereum could switch to post-quantum systems and continue operating at reduced capacity.

The second level is pqai-scaled, described as a stretch goal for a later fork. It would require:

• Post-quantum transactions operating at full capacity.
• Post-quantum blobs replacing the calldata fallback.
• Signature aggregation through EIP-8288 and post-quantum data availability through EIP-8479.
• Likely changes spanning both the execution and consensus layers.

“Reduced capacity” has a specific meaning in Ethlabs’ proposal. Post-quantum signatures are larger than current signatures, making transactions that use them more expensive to include. Blobs, the data channel used by rollups, are also not post-quantum. In an emergency, rollups could instead post their data as calldata in ordinary blocks. Ethlabs says that approach could absorb today’s blob volume at a higher cost. The chain would continue operating, but not as cheaply.

The pqai-ready target is a compressed timetable rather than an entirely new deadline. Ethlabs notes that the Ethereum Foundation had already moved its post-quantum target forward from 2029 to 2028. Ethlabs is seeking readiness one year earlier, while treating full-scale post-quantum operation in the same year as an additional achievement.

Why Quick Slots was withdrawn

Quick Slots, EIP-8198, would make slot duration an upgrade-adjustable parameter and initially reduce it from 12 seconds to 10 seconds. A slot is a scheduled opportunity to produce a block. Reducing the interval would give Ethereum six such opportunities per minute instead of five, or approximately 20% more.

The change would affect responsiveness rather than total capacity. The draft keeps gas and blob throughput per second stable by reducing the limits for each block. Blocks would arrive more frequently, but each would be smaller. Onchain markets could reprice more often, and a transaction might be included sooner, although the actual wait would continue to depend on fees, congestion and how applications batch requests.

Transaction finality is a separate issue from slot frequency. Coindoo previously examined Ethereum’s effort to shorten finality in its article on Ethereum’s 16-minute settlement wait.

Ethlabs said it continues to support the concept and plans to work toward shorter slots in 2028. For now, however, Quick Slots has been removed from the Hegotá list.

Ethlabs presented the withdrawal as a sacrifice. It had published a survey of 20 DeFi founders who supported the change and said it was prepared to defend the decision to those who had trusted the group to deliver it.

The proposal had not been assured of inclusion. The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol cluster published its assessment of Hegotá candidates on 7 September in its protocol update. Quick Slots received a B grade overall: research teams rated it strongly, while the engineering teams responsible for shipping it gave it a D.

The engineering concerns involved the chain of changes that a shorter slot would trigger across the consensus layer. Before increasing the proposal’s priority, engineers wanted a complete specification, a prototype, an analysis of its effects on applications and infrastructure, and evidence that it would not complicate the transition to decoupled consensus. Scheduled items were to be stabilised first.

Ethlabs addressed part of that list. In its week 14 update, the group reported that the Quick Slots feature specification had been merged. That resolved the first of the four requests, but client implementation and testing remained. Ethlabs was therefore giving up a feature it wanted and had support for, but whose position in Hegotá was still conditional. The withdrawal is less significant than removing an already scheduled headliner, while giving Ethlabs greater standing to argue for removing proposals it did not write.

Frames connects the security objectives

Frame Transactions, EIP-8141, is already Hegotá’s execution-layer headliner. It would make the way an account validates transactions and pays fees programmable instead of tying those functions to current elliptic-curve signatures.

In Ethlabs’ proposal, Frames would be deployed alongside SPHINCS, a hash-based signature scheme, and other post-quantum account proposals. Together, these mechanisms would give every account a path to post-quantum keys. They would also support key rotation, separate recovery keys and scoped permissions without third-party services. That broader functionality is why Ethlabs describes Frames as useful beyond the quantum-security issue.

Protocol support for a new signature scheme would represent only half of the migration. Wallets would need to implement the signing method and provide users with a clear process for moving their accounts. Validators would need pre-registration systems and tools to migrate to post-quantum keys. Ethlabs categorises this work as being “outside the hardfork schedule,” meaning the protocol could be ready before most users were prepared to use it.

Another part of the proposal is not cryptographic. Ethlabs wants client teams to receive dedicated time to harden their software with and against frontier AI models. It also relies on client diversity so that a bug discovered in one client cannot bring down the network. Post-quantum signatures do not address software vulnerabilities, while fixing software bugs does not protect a broken cryptographic curve. The proposed 2027 objective combines both types of security work.

FOCIL could be delayed

Ethlabs is also asking developers to reconsider FOCIL, EIP-7805, which is Hegotá’s consensus-layer headliner. FOCIL would require validators to publish inclusion lists that block builders must honour, limiting their ability to exclude eligible transactions. Its purpose is censorship resistance.

Several Ethlabs members co-authored the EIP, and the post says they advocated for it during earlier forks. The group’s case for delaying FOCIL rests on three arguments. First, it could slow post-quantum readiness. Second, its compatibility with a post-quantum consensus design remains unresolved, whether that design is a hash-based version of today’s Gasper or the “decoupled” protocol Ethlabs prefers as the eventual end state. Third, removing FOCIL would allow the execution layer to deploy Frames on its own timetable rather than waiting for the consensus layer.

The third argument amounts to a structural proposal. Ethlabs suggested splitting Hegotá into an early execution-layer fork and a consensus-layer fork that would arrive once post-quantum consensus was ready. The two layers could then be reconnected in the following upgrade.

The largest open question identified in the post is which consensus design should be made post-quantum. Ethlabs said converting Gasper would probably be the smaller task, but it remains unclear how many compromises that would require. The group has not determined whether moving directly to decoupled consensus would be simpler.

The next signs of progress

Ethereum’s published Hegotá guide, last updated on 16 October, lists FOCIL and Frames as scheduled for inclusion and Quick Slots as under consideration. That guide predates Ethlabs’ post and provides the baseline against which the proposal will be measured.

The first signal will be whether core developer calls record a decision to adopt pqai27 as Hegotá’s organising objective and whether FOCIL is reduced in scope, delayed or retained. The next will be the choice between post-quantum Gasper and decoupled consensus, which will determine the size of the consensus-layer workload. Working client implementations, interoperability tests, and wallet and validator migration tools would follow. Protocol readiness alone would not mean that users and infrastructure were ready.

Ethlabs described the timetable as ambitious and compared the effort with The Merge. Its argument is that committing to the direction now would cost less than changing course during a later fork, and that without a commitment the issue would return with each new AI model. Whether core developers accept that trade-off will determine how Hegotá develops.