Week 7. Proposal deadline for Hegotá upgrade.

Julian Ma · August 9, 2026 · also on 𝕏

Anyone who logged into crypto twitter this week saw that EIP discussions are in full swing. Last Thursday was the deadline to propose EIPs to be considered for inclusion in the Hegota upgrade expected somewhere in 2027. @barnabemonnot (Ethlabs) proposed faster slots (EIP-8198). Jerome de Tychey (EthCC) and Pintail (Independent) are championing Tapered Issuance Burn (EIP-8363). Most of our time this week went into discussing both proposals.

#Faster Slots

With the current upgrade, Glamsterdam, Ethereum will scale gas throughput by at least another 3.5x to 200 million gas limit. Gas supply has increased rapidly over the past 2 years, from 30 million gas limit until the end of January 2025 to 60 million gas limit today.

We believe cultivating demand is now a key imperative, in tandem with further supply increases. Improving the usability of Ethereum blockspace is a key demand driver, which is why we believe making Ethereum faster should be a top priority.

Faster Ethereum creates value for many different types of users — A slide that Barnabé presented on All Core Devs on Thursday. See full deck here and recording here.

On Thursday, Barnabé officially proposed the quick slots EIP, EIP-8198, authored by Carl Beekhuizen, to be considered for the Hegotá fork. The targets for Hegotá are two-fold:

Make slot time parametric in client code.
Decrease slot time to 10 seconds.

Today, slot time is baked into many implicit assumptions in consensus clients. For example, client code obtains the current slot from wall-clock time by dividing by 12 the number of seconds elapsed since beacon chain genesis. This will need to change to an accumulative function that reads a schedule of slot times, 12 seconds from genesis to Hegotá fork block, 10 seconds thereafter, etc.

We argue that a decrease from 12 to 10 seconds remains significant, if moderate. Beyond, it lays the foundations for iterative slot decreases, which over time will be very meaningful. Particularly so since the first decrease will take the most work, and this work will not be easy to slot in (pun intended) in some of the next network upgrades, delaying immediate user benefits by many more years.

Thank you for questions and support expressed during the presentation yesterday! Two points that were highlighted:

1. Identify potential issues with deployed contracts relying on the slot time. We will have more on this soon, doing joint work with @SourcifyEth, currently no… https://t.co/FlhQ7TlQo8
— Barnabé Monnot | barnabé.eth (@barnabemonnot) August 7, 2026

If you want to see shorter slots on Ethereum, we can use your help with:

Prioritization. This is the biggest blocker to the EIP. Tell us and everyone else about what exactly shorter slots unlock for you. The more specific the better.
Contract and infra assumptions. Does your contract or infra depend on slot times? Let us know.

#Issuance

On Tuesday, an EIP was released that proposes a change to Ethereum’s issuance curve. As an organization that cares about ETH and Ethereum, we care about issuance. @adietrichs has shared the Ethlabs view on issuance here

My thoughts on issuance:
1. the problem is real
2. the direction of the EIP is valid
3. but: changing issuance also has major downsides
4. most importantly: the decision must be with the community

I said a few words on the ACD call on Thursday, and wanted to expand on my…
— ansgar.eth (@adietrichs) August 9, 2026

#Looking forward

We’re preparing for our first offsite around NYC during the week of the 16th of August. It’ll be the first time the eight of us will be in person together.

Microphones to be used for transcription during offsite — Our transcription pipeline is ready for the offsite.

For those of you following closely, that is two more than our public team size. Announcements soon 👀

← All writings