Vitalik Buterin Weighs In as Devs Add Frame Transactions to Ethereum’s Next Upgrade Debate

Ethereum core devs have put “Frame Transactions” on the shortlist of Hegota headliner candidates, with Vitalik Buterin publicly engaging in the proposal thread the next day and arguing that the design can inherit ERC-4337-style mempool acceptance rules via paymasters.

ETH was trading at $2,304.7 (-0.6% 24h) across spot venues while the Hegota “headliner” debate circulated through dev channels.

Hegota Headliner Debate Turns to Frame Transactions

The “receipt” sits in Ethereum/EIPs PR #11202, which merged on Jan. 29, 2026, and added EIP-8141 (Frame Transaction) as a new transaction type proposal.

The Hegota framing matters because devs positioned Frame Transactions as a post-quantum migration path that also enshrines account abstraction primitives such as gas sponsorship and contract-based validation instead of enshrined ECDSA-only signing.

A separate Jan. 29, 2026, AllCoreDevs Execution agenda (ACDE #229) listed “Frame Transactions” and EIP-8105 “Universal Enshrined Encrypted Mempool (EEM)” as formal Hegota headliner presentations, with additional headliner slots for SSZ execution blocks and a follow-on session for FOCIL.

“4337 already supports full state access via the paymaster mechanism.” “A paymaster also serves as a de-facto custom mempool acceptance rule…”

Buterin posted that comment in the Frame Transactions headliner thread, explicitly tying the Frame design to the existing ERC-4337 paymaster + mempool rule mental model that infrastructure teams already run in production.

FOCIL remains the other censorship-resistance “receipt” devs keep citing into Glamsterdam and beyond, with EIP-7805 (Draft, created Nov. 1, 2024) specifying a 16-validator inclusion list committee and a MAX_BYTES_PER_INCLUSION_LIST = 8 KiB constraint.

Market Angle: Mempool Policy and Order Flow

Frame Transactions (EIP-8141) moves Ethereum’s transaction authentication surface area from a single fixed signature scheme into programmable validation frames, so the trade for desks is not “wallet UX.”

The trade is mempool policy and flow toxicity: once paymasters define acceptance rules and builders decide inclusion economics, you get new lanes of orderflow segmentation that interact directly with MEV supply chains.

If Hegota selects Frame as headliner in 2026 H2 planning, watch for builder behavior shifts around sponsored transactions, wallet infra rewrites that change retail routing, and a repricing of “protocol-level MEV protection” narratives already competing with EIP-8105 encrypted mempool bids for the same upgrade slot.