Crypto: Ethereum has reviewed 62 proposals for its 2027 update. Two were accepted.

Imagine a company publishing the internal memo where its engineers rank their own projects, including the rejected ones, the hesitations and the disagreements. That never happens.

That's exactly what the Ethereum Foundation's research team did on September 7. Sixty-two proposals put through the sieve, a note for each one, and the list made public.

Of the sixty-two cards spread across the table, only two came out with the note “this one, we ship it”.

A bit of vocabulary before anything else. At Ethereum, every change goes through a public form called an EIP, for improvement proposal. Anyone can submit one. It gets a number, it is discussed, it is accepted or rejected. It's the mandatory counter, and there's a line.

How sixty-two proposals are scored

The method is simple in a way that feels good. Sixteen contributors scored each proposal on their own, without consulting one another. S is worth 4 points, A is worth 3, B is worth 2, C is worth 1, and rejection is worth zero. In total, 397 scores, or a little more than six opinions per proposal. Only then did they discuss them together.

This is the first time this team has published a single opinion. Before, each group gave its own in its corner, and good luck figuring out what was going to come out of it.

Twenty-eight proposals discarded in one go. It's not a purge, it's what a shopping list is for: choosing.

Two proposals got an S. They have nothing to do with each other, and taken together they tell us quite well where this chain is headed.

The first: so that nobody can refuse your transaction

It carries the number 7805 and the nickname FOCIL, for “forced inclusion lists by chain choice rule”. In plain English: lists of transactions that have to get in. It got an S unanimously, the only one in the lot, and it has been stuck in the pipeline since November 2024.

To understand what it's for, you need to know what happens when you send a transaction today. You don't write it directly into the chain. It goes into a waiting room, and an actor called a block builder puts together the package of transactions that will be recorded. It chooses which ones get in and in what order.

There are few of these builders. Very few. And an actor who is one of a few deciding what gets in, that's called a gatekeeper.

Today, if the gatekeeper doesn't want your transaction, it waits. FOCIL serves to take that power away from him.

FOCIL adds a parallel path, and the mechanism is clever. Each round, a committee of sixteen validators is chosen at random. Each one looks at the pending transactions and puts together their list of the ones that have to get in. The builder is then forced to take them, because the other validators refuse to validate a block that ignored them. He doesn't lose his job, he loses his veto power.

Is this a real problem or a theoretician's worry? Both, honestly. The massive blockage hasn't happened. But the possibility exists, and today it rests on the goodwill of a few actors. Unanimity among sixteen engineers who didn't consult one another means they all find it necessary.

The second: changing the lock before the key can be copied

The second is called EIP-8141, frame transactions, and it's the stranger of the two. Among its authors is Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder.

Today, what proves that an account belongs to you is a unique type of mathematical signature, the same for everyone since day one. It relies on elliptic curves, an unbreakable method with today's computers. With a quantum computer big enough, it becomes readable. We're not talking about guessing your password: we're talking about recovering your private key from information that is already public.

The proposal breaks a transaction down into a sequence of programmable pieces, up to sixty-four, each handling one thing: checking that you have the right, paying the fees, executing the operation. It sounds like a plumbing detail. Except that if verification becomes a little program that your account carries itself, then the signature is no longer imposed by the protocol. You can change it.

The proposal's official text says it without mincing words: it provides “a native exit from the elliptic-curve cryptographic system used today to authenticate transactions, toward quantum-safe systems”.

The door hasn't been forced, the burglar doesn't exist yet, and we're changing the lock anyway. This is exactly the right time to do it.

Because we have to be honest about the timeline: the quantum computer capable of breaking these signatures doesn't exist. We're still at the stage of plugging two refrigerators together to fit more qubits into the same machine, and that was less than three weeks ago. Nobody knows whether the deadline is eight years away or thirty.

But changing the signature method of a chain that carries millions of accounts isn't something you do in a weekend once the fire has started. You prepare for it years in advance, calmly, while everything is going well. Another proposal in the batch, 8365, is starting to remove old vulnerable identifiers: the post describes it as the only truly post-quantum element that belongs in this update.

What this ranking is not

Now I'm going to put the brakes on a little, because half the articles I've read this week get everything mixed up.

This isn't a decision. It's an opinion, that of a research team, published to be discussed and challenged. The authors say so themselves and they've scheduled a public Q&A session for September 16. They even produced a list alongside it of the disagreements currently underway, something I'd really like to see more often elsewhere.

It's not for tomorrow either. The Hegotá update is expected in 2027, and it comes after another one, Glamsterdam, scheduled for late 2026. Proposal 8141 is still at the official draft stage.

What this ranking does say, on the other hand, is the direction. The S ranking commits us: if the schedule slips, we cut into the As before touching the top two.

Concretely, if you hold crypto

Nothing to do today. No button to click, no action to plan, and above all no urgency to invent.

What changes will be visible in two or three years, and this is what it will look like.

Your transactions will go through without depending on the goodwill of a few players. Concretely, no intermediary will be able to decide that your transfer, specifically, will have to wait. That probably never happens to you, and that's precisely the point of a guarantee: it serves you on the day it does happen.

Your wallet will be able to change its signature method without you moving your funds. That's the point that matters most on the day quantum becomes a real threat: the difference between updating your application and a panicked move of all your assets to a new address, at the same time as the whole world.

And your account will be able to do simple things that are complicated today: pay fees in something other than the chain's currency, chain two operations together in one, change your key without changing your address. This is the kind of improvement nobody ever talks about and that nevertheless decides whether your grandmother can use it.

One last remark, and this is the one I remember. While we tear each other apart over prices and promises, a few dozen engineers are rating four-point proposals, publishing their disagreements and arranging to meet on Reddit to get yelled at. The boring work, the kind you never see go by. Yet that is what decides whether all this will still be standing in ten years.

Sources

• Ethereum Foundation : The Hegotá EIP Opinion Post and Tier List, published on September 7, 2026 and updated on the 8th, the original post with the scoring method, the sixteen contributors, the 397 scores, the full ranking and the Q&A session on September 16
• EIP-8141 : Frame Transaction, the official text of the proposal, its authors including Vitalik Buterin, its filing date of January 29, 2026, the division into sixty-four frames and the sentence about moving to quantum-safe signatures
• EIP-7805 : FOCIL, the official text of the proposal on including transactions without depending on block builders
• Blockchain.News : Ethereum Foundation grades 62 EIPs for Hegotá upgrade, September 7, 2026, the breakdown by rank and the schedule for the update