Slated to roll out in late Q3 2026 or early Q4 2026, Ethereum’s Hegota upgrade may include Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 8182, which will introduce a layer of private transfers on the protocol.
Ethereum Hegota upgrade may include EIP-8182
Momentum is picking up for Ethereum’s highly-anticipated Hegota upgrade. On Monday, Ethereum layer-2 network Facet co-founder Tom Lehman proposed the idea of including EIP-8182 in the upcoming protocol upgrade.
EIP-8182 is a proposal to add a protocol-level privacy pool to Ethereum that would enable native private ETH and ERC-20 transfers through a shared shielded pool.
The proposal uses a UTXO-based design with zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, allowing users to send private transfers to regular Ethereum addresses or ENS names without requiring separate privacy-specific wallets.
The protocol-level privacy pool in EIP-8182 is important, since most of the existing privacy solutions don’t offer real anonymity without a critical mass of users.
As a result, they cannot attract the desired number of users with sufficient anonymity infrastructure already in place. It’s like a Catch-22 situation. Lehman added that competition among privacy pools fragments anonymity sets, leading to a weaker privacy guarantee for participants.
As a solution, EIP-8182 promises to offer a single shared pool to build on, to every Ethereum-based wallet and application. Any transaction that sends an ERC-20 token will automatically integrate privacy features.
More about the Hegota upgrade
Hegota will be the next major Ethereum upgrade after last year’s Fusaka upgrade, which went live on December 3, 2025. While Fusaka focused on enhancing scalability, increased gas limit, and PeerDAS implementation, Hegota is tilted toward privacy features.
Besides EIP-8182, there are two more EIPs that are included in the Hegota upgrade – namely EIP-8141, and EIP-8250.
While EIP-8141 facilitates privacy pools to pay withdrawal fees from the withdrawn funds, EIP-8250 makes it possible to add keyed nonces to circumvent shared-sender privacy designs.
In simple words, EIP-8250 helps privacy systems work properly when multiple people or apps are sending transactions from the same address without breaking or revealing patterns.
Privacy narrative is picking steam in the crypto markets, evident from the significant price appreciation in several privacy-based digital assets. Earlier in May 2026, leading privacy cryptocurrency Zcash jumped by over 70 percent in a week.