What’s happening

Core developers have formally placed a controversial inclusion-enforcement proposal onto Ethereum’s upgrade path and senior protocol voices are tying that change into a broader, cypherpunk-oriented campaign to simplify the base layer, harden censorship resistance, and reduce reliance on off-chain intermediaries.

The roadmap item, filed as EIP-7805 (FOCIL), would let validator groups enforce ordered inclusion through fork-choice rules and curated transaction lists; blocks that systematically ignore those lists could be orphaned. The intent is to reduce the ability of sequencers and relayers to suppress valid public-mempool transactions indefinitely.

Paired with FOCIL is an account-abstraction upgrade recorded as EIP-8141, designed to enable native smart-wallet primitives, multisig and social-recovery flows, and gas-sponsorship patterns that do not require intermediary wrappers. Together, these EIPs aim to make privacy and smart-wallet UX work at protocol speed rather than relying on fragile off-chain broadcasts.

Developers and Foundation planners are folding these pieces into an explicit 2026 engineering agenda that names Glamsterdam as a coordination point in H1 2026 and pencils a FOCIL-centered Hegota hard fork for later in 2026. That cadence allows teams to land capacity and UX changes first and follow with inclusion-enforcement and other consensus-affecting work.

The Foundation’s roadmap also signals significant infrastructure pushes: maintainers are targeting materially higher block compute ceilings (working targets push past 100,000,000 gas and community conversations have floated figures near ~180,000,000), and a formal post-quantum (PQ) program is under way with multi-client PQ devnets and recurring core-dev calls (the program reports roughly ~20% overall progress across subsystems).

Complementary technical work discussed in planning sessions includes ZK-native primitives and exploratory execution changes — a lightweight “Beam” concept for ZK friendliness and investigations into porting parts of the execution environment toward RISC-V to improve verification and multi-language support for future ZK stacks.

On the client and UX side, Vitalik and other contributors are promoting projects and patterns intended to widen who can verify and use the chain: examples include privacy frameworks such as Kohaku, lightweight verifier efforts like Helios, and account-abstraction features that make social-recovery and seedless workflows practical for everyday users.

A recurring governance theme is institutionalizing “garbage collection”: making removals, demotions and migrations first-class upgrade actions so legacy behaviors can be pruned or moved into optional contracts, thereby reducing attack surface and lowering the resource burden on full-node operators.

These technical directions carry trade-offs. Supporters argue the combination of account abstraction, native privacy tooling and inclusion enforcement reduces dependence on centralized relays and custody providers and makes censorship-resistance properties more testable. Critics warn the inclusion mechanism may increase on-chain complexity, operational risk and potential legal exposure for validators who enforce curated inclusion lists.

Operational planning attempts to address some risks: the PQ program is prototyping migration tooling and staged emergency transitions (including ZK-assisted ownership proofs), and client teams are prioritizing lightweight verification paths so higher gas ceilings do not unduly concentrate validation. Still, the legal and governance debates over validator obligations and includer liability are likely to intensify as specification work moves toward implementations.

Taken together, the push reframes 2026 not as a loose set of patches but as an orchestrated campaign that links capacity increases, UX and wallet ergonomics, native privacy and account abstraction, and consensus-level inclusion guarantees — with the stated goal of restoring practical self-sovereignty for users while keeping the protocol viable for institutional actors.