Ethereum Advances FOCIL as Hegota’s Headline Upgrade for Inclusion Guarantees

Ethereum developers are moving forward with a protocol change aimed at strengthening censorship resistance, as discussions around the upcoming Hegota upgrade place Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists at the center of the agenda.

The proposal, known as FOCIL or EIP-7805, has been marked for Specification Freeze Included status and is expected to headline the consensus-layer changes in the Hegota fork, which follows the planned Glamsterdam upgrade.

FOCIL Targets Inclusion Guarantees

FOCIL introduces a mechanism that allows multiple randomly selected actors per slot to enforce transaction inclusion. Under the design, 17 participants, including the block proposer and designated includers, are selected at random to help ensure that transactions are incorporated into blocks.

Related: Ethereum’s Biggest Performance Leap Yet? Fusaka Brings PeerDAS and Faster UX

The structure is intended to provide easy inclusion, typically within one to two slots, even if block production is controlled by an adversarial proposer.

In its current form, each FOCIL list is limited to 8 kilobytes. Researchers have outlined a possible path to expand these lists in the future, allowing a larger share of block transactions to pass through the inclusion list mechanism if necessary.

The proposal retains proposer-builder separation through enshrined PBS, meaning the “last look” role tied to maximal extractable value remains auctioned rather than controlled by inclusion list participants.

Thomas Thiery, a researcher with the Ethereum Foundation’s Robust Incentives Group, previously advanced FOCIL as a censorship-resistance measure. His work has focused on block production centralization and proposer-builder separation, both of which are directly addressed by the proposal.

EIP-8141 Expands Smart Account Functionality

In parallel, Vitalik Buterin outlined how EIP-8141, an account abstraction proposal based on EIP-7701, could operate alongside FOCIL. According to Buterin, EIP-8141 would make smart accounts first-class transaction senders, enabling features such as multisignature authorization, quantum-resistant signatures, key rotation, gas sponsorship, and privacy protocol interactions without wrapper transactions.

Under this structure, transactions from smart wallets or privacy protocols could be broadcast through a public mempool and directly received by a FOCIL includer. The combination of FOCIL and EIP-8141 would allow such transactions to be included on-chain without intermediaries, even if proposers do not connect to public mempools or discriminate against certain applications.

Related: Vitalik Buterin Pushes ZK Proofs to Make ETH The Home for AI: Why Now?