Key Highlights
- The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol cluster is targeting December 2029 for post-quantum readiness across Ethereum’s L1.
- The plan includes a minimum viable post-quantum milestone designed as a temporary safeguard before full quantum resistance is achieved.
- FOCIL and Frame Transactions have emerged as the two main priorities for the upcoming Hegotá fork.
The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol cluster has outlined a longer-term roadmap for Ethereum’s protocol development as work begins on the network’s next major upgrade, Hegotá.
In a post published September 7, the cluster said it is targeting December 2029 for Ethereum Layer 1 to become resistant to quantum attacks across its execution, consensus and data layers.
The roadmap comes as Ethereum enters the scoping phase for Hegotá while Glamsterdam continues toward its planned mainnet launch.
Ethereum sets December 2029 post-quantum target
The Protocol cluster described post-quantum security as a long-term priority while acknowledging that the arrival of sufficiently capable quantum computers remains uncertain.
The Foundation is currently planning around the possibility of “Q-day” arriving as early as 2030, describing the assumption as deliberately aggressive.
The target is scheduled to be reassessed in January 2027 with input from external experts.
The roadmap places a minimum viable post-quantum (MV-PQ) milestone ahead of the full transition, allowing Ethereum to begin moving toward quantum-resistant infrastructure before every component of the network has been upgraded.
The work covers Ethereum’s execution, consensus and data layers, each of which presents different technical challenges.
On the execution layer, the Foundation is examining greater cryptographic flexibility through account abstraction and related changes that could allow Ethereum to support new signature schemes without requiring a separate hard fork for every change.
The consensus layer presents a separate challenge because its cryptographic signatures and aggregation mechanisms require coordinated changes across Ethereum’s validator infrastructure.
Ethereum reassesses hash functions for post-quantum cryptography
Ethereum researchers are reconsidering which hash functions could be used in the network’s post-quantum cryptography work.
Earlier research examined specialized functions such as Poseidon, partly because of their efficiency in zero-knowledge proofs. However, advances in binary-field SNARKs have made established functions such as SHA-2 and BLAKE more practical for proof systems.
The change means researchers can evaluate hash functions more broadly based on security, proving efficiency and implementation complexity, rather than prioritizing specialized functions for their proof performance alone.
The research does not rule out Poseidon or other specialized options, but shows that Ethereum’s post-quantum design is still evolving as proof technology improves.
Five research areas shape Ethereum’s longer roadmap
The Protocol cluster identified five major research areas for Ethereum’s longer-term development: post-quantum security, fast finality, privacy, state and zkEVM.
The fast-finality work aims to reduce Ethereum’s finality time from minutes to seconds. The current direction would separate finality from block production and redesign parts of the consensus layer around an availability chain and finality mechanism.
The state research arc will focus on Ethereum’s growing state requirements, including a planned trie migration and improvements to decentralized access to current and historical state.
The zkEVM roadmap is moving toward a model in which validators eventually verify succinct execution proofs rather than re-executing every block themselves. Under the current roadmap, mandatory execution proofs are targeted for a later fork, although the ordering remains under review.
Privacy enters Ethereum’s protocol roadmap
The Foundation’s roadmap also calls for Ethereum L1 to eventually provide privacy as a protocol-level guarantee.
The work is expected to begin with Hegotá. Two proposed EIPs are particularly relevant.
EIP-8250, Keyed Nonces, would allow multiple users to share the same sender while maintaining separate nonces, potentially improving transaction privacy and preventing transactions from blocking one another.
EIP-8272, Recent Roots, would allow private transactions to use recent onchain state in a format that can still be checked by validators.
The Foundation said these proposals could address some barriers preventing private transactions from receiving the same censorship-resistance guarantees as conventional Ethereum activity.
Later work is expected to examine privacy at a larger scale, including encrypted mempools that hide transaction contents until transactions are included in blocks.
Hegotá scope narrows around two headliners
While Ethereum’s longer-term roadmap covers several research areas, the Foundation said it wants the immediate Hegotá fork to remain relatively focused.
The two main protocol changes identified as Hegotá’s headliners are EIP-7805, Fork-choice enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL), and EIP-8141, Frame Transactions.
FOCIL is designed to strengthen transaction inclusion by allowing multiple validators to impose requirements on transactions included in builders’ blocks. Frame Transactions are intended to provide a native form of account abstraction while creating a path toward greater cryptographic flexibility.
The Foundation said Frames could eventually help Ethereum move away from secp256k1 keys and support new signature schemes without requiring a hard fork for every scheme.
The Protocol cluster also evaluated 62 proposed EIPs using six priority categories, ranging from S-tier proposals that define the fork to DFI proposals declined for inclusion, with A, B and C tiers representing different levels of priority and TBD covering proposals requiring more evidence.
Only two EIPs received S-tier status: FOCIL and Frame Transactions. Another 15 proposals were placed in the A tier, while 8 received B-tier status and 7 were placed in C.
The Foundation said 28 proposals were declined, while two remained unranked pending further evidence.
Several proposals deferred or rejected
The tier list indicates that the Foundation is limiting the amount of work entering the next fork.
For example, EIP-8198, Quick Slots, was placed in the B tier and requires a full specification, prototype, ecosystem impact assessment and confirmation that it will not complicate Ethereum’s planned consensus redesign.
Other proposals were rejected because they were considered unnecessary for Hegotá or potentially disruptive to longer-term plans.
On the consensus layer, the Foundation declined EIP-8142, Block-in-Blobs, citing concerns about increasing dependence on KZG structures.
On the execution side, EIP-8182, Private ETH and ERC-20 Transfers, were also declined. The Foundation said its Frames-based privacy approach could pursue similar goals with less protocol-specific infrastructure while allowing different privacy schemes to compete.
Some declined proposals could still be reconsidered for later forks.
Ethereum’s development process becomes more parallel
The Foundation expects research for several future upgrades to continue while Hegotá is being implemented rather than waiting for each fork to finish before beginning work on the next one.
Client teams, researchers, cryptographers, security reviewers, grant recipients and external contributors are expected to work on overlapping timelines.
Each stage of development is intended to provide additional implementation evidence before an upgrade is committed to a fork.
This approach also gives Ethereum researchers more flexibility to reassess technical choices as cryptographic research progresses, as seen with the changing approach to hash functions for post-quantum work.
Hegotá will test the Roadmap
The Foundation said Hegotá is not intended to be Ethereum’s post-quantum fork.
Instead, the upgrade is being treated as an early test of the development process needed for later security changes.
The post-quantum transition will instead depend on further research, cryptographic development, client implementations and testing across the Ethereum ecosystem.
For now, Hegotá is being scoped around FOCIL and Frame Transactions, while Ethereum continues work across post-quantum security, privacy, fast finality, state scaling and zkEVM development.
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