Ethereum Foundation grades all 62 Hegotá EIPs in first unified tier list

It is the first time the group has spoken with one voice on a fork instead of leaving each team to post its own opinions. 

The list is now the reference point for which features are locked in and which are on the chopping block.

S means must ship, DFI means declined

The tier list was posted alongside a companion piece on cluster priorities on Monday, September 7, and it sorts each proposal into bands that carry hard delivery commitments. 

An S grade means a feature defines the fork and the schedule bends before its scope does. An A is expected to ship and can only be cut after every S item is safe. B-tier proposals are admitted one at a time. Most of them come with three requirements: a prototype, a sign-off, and a settled specification. 

C-tier lands below the line without being disqualified, and DFI, which means “declined for inclusion,” follows.

The reason for a DFI could be security risk or a threat to a later milestone. A separate TBD band holds proposals back until mainnet data can answer questions the cluster can’t answer today.

Only FOCIL, filed as EIP-7805, earned a clean S. The proposal enables any user to get an eligible transaction included without leaning 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?

It is said that roughly 60 researchers and engineers were involved in the scoring process of determining what to prioritize. These people were put in nine teams in addition to individual domain experts, and together they filled out 16 contribution templates between themselves.

Twelve of those provided actual tier grades, and several of them were only on the EIPs where they held deep expertise. 

The teams that make up the protocol cluster were able to produce 397 grades across the 62 proposals at an average of 6.4 per EIP. The most contested items got as high as nine grades apiece.

The contributors carried out the scoring independently. The Protocol Cluster mentioned in its blog that Geth, as an execution-layer client, will still ship its own standalone list.

The whole thing points at quantum resistance

The grades are part of a longer-term goal that was spelled out in the post on the cluster’s 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 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, and that is if it happens at all.

It also says that it will treat the self-imposed deadline as non-negotiable at least until a January 2027 reassessment with outside experts.

For the Foundation to reach that target after a December 2026 Glamsterdam launch, it will 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 around five overlapping research arcs, which are 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 cofounder Vitalik Buterin has been a leading voice in the advocacy 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 then said post-quantum privacy can then come at scale. They also mentioned that Hegota is the post-quantum fork; instead, it will be the one that determines how soon that fork happens.

The protocol cluster sayss that Hegota implementation by client teams can realistically start in late Q4 2026.