Ethereum developers have officially named the network’s second planned upgrade for 2026, adding more clarity to the blockchain’s long-term development timeline.
The upcoming hard fork, scheduled to follow the Glamsterdam upgrade, will be called Hegota, continuing Ethereum’s established naming conventions across its execution and consensus layers.
Key takeaways:
Ethereum’s second planned upgrade of 2026 will be called Hegota.
The upgrade will follow Glamsterdam as part of the network’s twice-yearly release cycle.
The headline improvement for Hegota has not yet been selected.
Developers expect to finalize key decisions as 2026 development progresses.
The name Hegota combines two parallel tracks of Ethereum development. On the execution side, the upgrade carries the name “Bogota,” in line with the tradition of referencing past or future Devcon host cities. On the consensus side, it adopts “Heze,” a name derived from a star, reflecting the network’s dual-layer architecture. Developers emphasized that while the name is now locked in, the headline proposal for the upgrade will not be chosen until early 2026.
The decision was finalized during the final All Core Developers Execution call of the year. Development discussions are set to resume in early January, when engineers expect to finalize the scope of Glamsterdam, the first Ethereum upgrade currently penciled in for 2026.
Ethereum’s upgrade cadence takes shape
With multiple hard forks successfully shipped in 2025, Ethereum’s development process is now settling into a more predictable rhythm. The network has effectively transitioned to a twice-yearly release cycle, a model designed to favor smaller, incremental improvements over infrequent, sweeping changes.
Under this cadence, Glamsterdam is expected to land in the first half of 2026, with Hegota following later in the year. While Glamsterdam’s feature set is nearing definition, Hegota remains in an earlier planning phase and will likely absorb longer-term roadmap items or proposals that do not make the earlier deadline.
Among the most frequently discussed candidates for a 2026 upgrade are Verkle Trees, a major step toward reducing the amount of data required to run an Ethereum node. Verkle Trees are considered a key building block for achieving stateless clients, although developers have not yet committed to including them in either Glamsterdam or Hegota.
Other areas under consideration include mechanisms for expiring old state and historical data, as well as additional optimizations to Ethereum’s execution layer. These discussions have gained urgency as researchers warn that Ethereum’s ever-growing state size is placing increasing strain on node operators.
Glamsterdam’s focus on efficiency and decentralization
While Hegota remains largely conceptual, work on Glamsterdam is moving forward. The upcoming upgrade is expected to concentrate on improving Layer 1 efficiency and addressing centralization risks in block production.
Proposals still under review include enshrined proposer-builder separation, which aims to limit the influence of large block builders, as well as block-level access lists intended to reduce performance bottlenecks related to state access. Developers are also evaluating gas cost adjustments to better reflect actual resource usage within the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
More ambitious changes, such as reducing slot times, have already been deferred to future cycles. Any proposals that prove too complex to safely implement in Glamsterdam could be pushed into Hegota once its scope begins to solidify.
Positioning Hegota within Ethereum’s long-term roadmap
The naming of Hegota also reinforces Ethereum’s broader, multi-stage technical roadmap. That roadmap began with The Merge in 2022, which transitioned the network from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
Subsequent phases — known as The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge — outline Ethereum’s ambitions for scalability, statelessness, data cleanup, and long-term simplification. Recent upgrades have advanced The Surge by expanding data availability for rollups, while upcoming work in Glamsterdam and Hegota is expected to further support this scaling without sacrificing decentralization.
Potential Verkle Tree integration would align closely with The Verge, helping lower hardware requirements and making it easier for more participants to run nodes. Later phases will focus on pruning historical complexity and refining the protocol once these foundational goals are achieved.
With Hegota now officially named, Ethereum’s development roadmap for 2026 is becoming clearer — even as the most consequential technical decisions still lie ahead.
