Ethereum Core Developers Name 2026 Upgrade 'Hegota,' Focus on Statelessness

Ethereum core developers have formally designated the network upgrade scheduled to follow the 'Glamsterdam' hard fork as 'Hegota.' This naming convention was finalized during the final All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) call of 2025, held on Thursday, December 18, 2025. The name is a portmanteau derived from the execution-layer host city, 'Bogota,' and the consensus-layer star name, 'Heze,' aligning with established protocol for naming subsequent upgrades.

This decision establishes a clear technical direction beyond the immediate 2026 upgrades, reinforcing a commitment to foundational roadmap objectives. The development rhythm is now set at a predictable twice-a-year upgrade schedule, following the completion of Pectra in May 2025 and Fusaka on December 3, 2025. The central technical objective anticipated for the Hegota upgrade is the implementation of statelessness, a key component of 'The Verge' phase of the Ethereum roadmap.

Achieving statelessness is expected to involve the inclusion of Verkle Trees, representing a significant architectural transition from the current Merkle Patricia trees. Verkle Trees are a data structure designed to substantially reduce the storage burden on full nodes by allowing the creation of smaller cryptographic proofs, known as witnesses. This advancement is necessary for enabling stateless clients, which can verify blocks using these minimal witnesses instead of maintaining the entire, expanding state database locally.

The urgency for this architectural shift stems from concerns over state bloat, which threatens decentralization by increasing operational costs for nodes, estimated to be between $500 and $2,000 monthly for standard nodes in 2025. Hegota's scope is also anticipated to include structural improvements for state management, such as state and history expiry mechanisms. State expiry would safely move older, unused state data to an archive layer, addressing the network's current state size of 1.4 terabytes, which is growing at a daily rate of 0.07%.

The selection process for the headline Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) for Hegota is scheduled to begin between early January and February 2026, ensuring the immediate priority remains the successful deployment of the preceding Glamsterdam upgrade in the first half of 2026. This disciplined, twice-yearly cadence, demonstrated by Pectra and Fusaka in 2025, supports controlled scope management for the network’s evolution. While Layer-2 rollups, handling over 92% of all Ethereum transactions in 2025, alleviate immediate congestion, the underlying state issue persists as L2s post data commitments to Layer 1. Hegota’s focus on statelessness and Verkle Trees is a pragmatic measure to create a leaner foundation capable of supporting future scaling without compromising core decentralization principles.

By lowering the hardware barrier for node operation, the upgrade aims to ensure infrastructure accessibility for a broader set of participants, mitigating centralization risks associated with rising storage demands. Execution-layer optimizations and gas repricing are also expected areas of focus as developers seek to enhance overall transaction efficiency alongside foundational data structure improvements.