Ethereum’s next big upgrade has 66 proposals, including a major privacy fix

Ethereum developers are deciding whether the blockchain’s next major upgrade, Hegotá, should make it easier to build private transactions without relying on middlemen.

As with other blockchains, all Ethereum addresses are permanent and hold a running balance, so anyone can read an address’s full history and see what it holds. That presents a problem for payroll, treasury operations or anyone who would rather not publish their finances.

Dealing with that has been left to applications built on top of Ethereum. A package now under consideration would move part of the job into the network itself.

The centerpiece is Frame Transactions, or Ethereum Improvement Proposal 8141 (EIP-8141), which would let an account define how a transaction is approved, executed and paid for, rather than forcing every user through the same setup.

For an ordinary user, that could mean a wallet where someone else covers the fee, several actions are bundled into one payment, or the cryptography approving a transaction changes without moving to a new account.

Toni Wahrstätter, an Ethereum Foundation researcher and a co-author of the proposal, set out the case for it in an X post as developers began narrowing Hegotá's scope.