Hegota upgrade will become the basis for a scalable Ethereum in 2026

Key points:

• Ethereum has officially approved the Hegota upgrade, which will be part of the network’s new two-year development cycle.
• The upgrade will implement Verkle trees and allow nodes to verify blocks without storing the full state, reducing data requirements by 90%.

Ethereum plans to launch the Hegota upgrade at the end of 2026. The decision was approved on December 18, 2025, at a meeting of key Ethereum developers. It confirms the network’s transition to a two-year cycle of major updates, which aims to solve long-term scalability issues.

The upgrade is called Hegota. It combines two levels of the network: Heze (consensus level) and Bogota (execution level). The name emphasizes that this is not about isolated improvements, but a coordinated change to the basic architecture of Ethereum.

What is Hegota

Unlike updates aimed at rapid performance growth, Hegota focuses on one of Ethereum’s most painful problems: network state bloat. Over time, the amount of data that a node must store is constantly growing, making it increasingly expensive and difficult to run a full node.

A key element of Hegota will be the introduction of Verkle trees. This is a new data structure that will replace current methods of storage and status verification. Its main advantage is significantly more compact cryptographic proofs.

This will allow nodes to verify blocks without storing the entire blockchain state. According to the developers’ estimates, disk space requirements could be reduced by approximately 90%. This will dramatically reduce the cost of participating in the network and simplify the launch of nodes.

Hegota’s place in the plans for 2026

Hegota will be released after the Glamsterdam upgrade, scheduled for the first half of 2026. Glamsterdam will focus on the execution layer: parallel transaction processing and increasing the gas limit. In the long term, this could bring the network’s throughput closer to 10 000 transactions per second.

Although the timing for Hegota has been confirmed, the final set of changes has not yet been determined. Developers plan to approve key EIPs by February 2026.