Ethlabs is pulling its 10-second block proposal from Ethereum’s Hegotá upgrade and asking core developers to put post-quantum and AI-hardened security ahead of everything else in 2027.
Key Takeaways
- Quick Slots withdrawn; roadmap reshuffle still unapproved
- “Ready” and “scaled” are separate 2027 targets
- EF engineers had already flagged Quick Slots risk
- FOCIL could slip under the same plan
The decision appears in an 11 November post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, written after Ethlabs spent Devcon week in Mumbai with core developers, and it has two parts that carry very unequal weight.
Ethlabs is a nonprofit research group launched in June by five former Ethereum Foundation researchers, with funding from Bitmine, SharpLink and Consensys founder Joe Lubin. It wrote Quick Slots and spent the autumn campaigning for it, so withdrawing the proposal from Hegotá is a call the group can make alone. The rest of the post, which asks core developers to treat post-quantum and “post-AI” security as the organising goal for 2027 and to reorder Hegotá around it, is a position paper. It changes nothing on the roadmap until the core developer process adopts it.
Ethlabs calls the target “pqai27”. Post-quantum means cryptography a large quantum computer could not break. Post-AI is the group’s own coinage and covers two things: cryptography resting on as few mathematical assumptions as possible, because Ethlabs argues AI systems that solve open maths problems could one day expose weaknesses nobody anticipated, and client software hardened against models that find bugs at scale. The post attaches “plausibly” to the second term every time it uses it, and does not claim the design would be provably safe.
Hegotá is the upgrade scheduled after Glamsterdam, which Ethlabs says should ship as planned. The question it raises is what Hegotá contains, not whether Glamsterdam slips.
Two finish lines sit inside the 2027 date
The post splits its own target into two levels, and a “quantum-safe Ethereum by 2027” headline that ignores the split would overstate what is being proposed.
Level one · targeted for Hegotá
pqai-ready
- Consensus runs on post-quantum cryptography
- Every account has a post-quantum migration route
- Network keeps the capacity Glamsterdam delivers
- If today’s cryptography breaks, Ethereum switches over and keeps running at reduced capacity
Level two · stretch goal, later fork
pqai-scaled
- Post-quantum transactions at full capacity
- Post-quantum blobs replace the calldata fallback
- Needs signature aggregation (EIP-8288) and post-quantum data availability (EIP-8479)
- Likely a shared execution- and consensus-layer fork
“Reduced capacity” has a specific meaning in the post. Post-quantum signatures are larger than today’s, so transactions carrying them would cost more to include. Blobs, the data lane rollups rely on, are not post-quantum either; in an emergency, rollups would fall back to posting their data as calldata inside ordinary blocks, which Ethlabs says could absorb today’s blob volume at a higher price. The chain would keep running, just not cheaply.
The ready level is less a new deadline than a compressed one. Ethlabs notes the Ethereum Foundation had already pulled its post-quantum target forward from 2029 to 2028. The group wants readiness a year earlier still, and treats full-scale operation as a bonus if it can be reached in the same year.
What 10-second slots would have changed
Quick Slots, EIP-8198, would turn slot time into a parameter adjustable at upgrades and cut it first from 12 seconds to 10. A slot is a scheduled chance to produce a block, so the change would give the network six chances a minute instead of five, roughly 20% more.
That is a responsiveness change rather than a capacity change. The draft holds gas and blob throughput per second steady by shrinking the per-block limits, so blocks would arrive more often with each one smaller. Onchain markets could reprice more frequently; a user’s transaction might land sooner, though the wait would still depend on fees, congestion and how an application batches requests. How quickly a transaction becomes irreversible is a separate problem, which Coindoo examined in its piece on Ethereum’s effort to shorten finality.
Ethlabs says it still believes in the idea and will work towards quicker slots in 2028. For now the proposal is off the Hegotá list.
Quick Slots was already a delivery risk
The withdrawal reads as a sacrifice, and Ethlabs presents it as one. The group had published a survey of 20 DeFi founders backing the change and says it is ready to defend the decision to the people who trusted it to deliver.
But the feature was never a sure thing. The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol cluster published its assessment of Hegotá candidates on 7 September and gave Quick Slots a B grade: research teams rated it strongly, while the engineering teams responsible for shipping gave it a D. Their objection was the chain of knock-on changes a shorter slot triggers across the consensus layer. Before raising its priority they wanted a full specification, a prototype, an analysis of effects on applications and infrastructure, and evidence the change would not complicate the move to decoupled consensus. Scheduled items were to be stabilised first.
Ethlabs worked through part of that list; by its 14th week it reported the Quick Slots feature specification had been merged. A merged spec answers the first of the four asks, with client implementation and testing still ahead. So what Ethlabs gives up is a feature it wanted and had community backing for, but one whose place in Hegotá remained conditional. That makes the gesture cheaper than pulling a scheduled headliner would be, and it gives the group standing to argue for cutting items it did not write.
Frames serves both goals
Frame Transactions, EIP-8141, already Hegotá’s execution-layer headliner, makes the way an account validates a transaction and pays fees programmable instead of hard-wired to today’s elliptic-curve signatures. In Ethlabs’ sketch, Frames ships together with SPHINCS, a hash-based signature scheme, and other post-quantum account proposals, giving every account a path to post-quantum keys. The same machinery allows key rotation, separate recovery keys and scoped permissions without third-party services, which is why the post describes it as useful well beyond the quantum case.
Protocol support for a new signature scheme is half of a migration. Wallets must implement the signing method and give holders a clear process for moving; validators need pre-registration and tooling to shift to post-quantum keys. Ethlabs files all of that under work “outside the hardfork schedule”, which means the chain can be ready before most of its users are.
A third strand of the plan is not cryptographic at all. Ethlabs wants client teams given dedicated time to harden their software with, and against, frontier AI models, and it leans on client diversity so that a bug found in one client cannot take the network down. A post-quantum signature scheme does nothing for that risk; fixing software bugs does nothing for a broken curve. The 2027 target bundles both.
FOCIL is the harder ask
The one item Ethlabs wants reconsidered that it does not own is FOCIL, EIP-7805, Hegotá’s consensus-layer headliner. FOCIL has validators publish inclusion lists that block builders must honour, limiting their ability to leave eligible transactions out. Its purpose is censorship resistance.
Several Ethlabs members co-authored the EIP and the post says they pushed for it in earlier forks. Their case for delaying it now has three parts: it slows post-quantum readiness; its compatibility with a post-quantum consensus design, whether a hash-based version of today’s Gasper or the “decoupled” protocol Ethlabs prefers as the end state, is unresolved; and without FOCIL, the execution layer could ship Frames on its own timetable instead of waiting for the consensus layer. That last point amounts to a structural proposal: Ethlabs floats splitting Hegotá into an execution-layer fork that goes early and a consensus-layer fork that arrives when post-quantum consensus is ready, with the two recoupled in the following upgrade.
Which consensus design to make post-quantum is the open question the post flags as largest. Converting Gasper is probably the smaller job, Ethlabs says, but it is unclear how many compromises that involves, and the group has not settled whether jumping straight to decoupled consensus would be simpler.
What would show the plan has traction
Ethereum’s published Hegotá guide, last updated 16 October, lists FOCIL and Frames as scheduled for inclusion and Quick Slots as under consideration. That is the baseline the proposal will be measured against, and it predates the post.
The signals to watch come in order. First is whether core developer calls record a decision to adopt pqai27 as Hegotá’s organising goal, and whether FOCIL is descoped, delayed or kept. Second is the choice between post-quantum Gasper and decoupled consensus, which sets the size of the consensus-layer workload. After that come working client implementations, interoperability tests, and wallet and validator migration tools, because readiness in the protocol is not readiness for the people using it.
Ethlabs itself calls the timeline ambitious and compares the effort to The Merge. Its argument is that committing now costs less than pivoting mid-fork later, and that without a commitment the question would return with every new AI model. Whether core developers accept that trade is the decision Hegotá now turns on.
Reporter at Coindoo
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
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