Ethereum Foundation Unveils Unified Tier List for Hegotá EIPs

The Ethereum Foundation has released a unified tier list of all 62 EIPs proposed for Hegotá, a network upgrade that will follow Glamsterdam. This is the first time the group has spoken with one voice on a fork instead of leaving each team to post their own opinions. The list sorts each proposal into bands that carry hard delivery commitments, and it's now the reference point for which features are locked in and which are on the chopping block.

The tier list was posted alongside a companion piece on cluster priorities on Monday, September 7, and it assigns grades to each proposal. An S grade means a feature defines the fork and the schedule bends before its scope does. 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, while C-tier lands below the line without being disqualified.

The reason for a DFI (declined for inclusion) could be a security risk or a threat to a later milestone. Only FOCIL, filed as EIP-7805, earned a clean S grade. This proposal enables any user to get an eligible transaction included without leaning on centralized block builders.

The grading process involved 60 researchers and engineers who were divided into nine teams in addition to individual domain experts. They filled out 16 contribution templates between themselves, producing 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 Protocol Cluster's work is now around five overlapping research arcs: fast finality, post-quantum, privacy, state, and zkEVM. They plan to start working on privacy in Hegota to deliver native, trustless, censorship-resistant private transactions on Ethereum L1.