Tom Lehman, co-founder of Layer 2 network Facet, pitched EIP-8182 — first introduced in March — for inclusion in Ethereum's Hegota upgrade on Friday, arguing for a protocol-managed shielded pool to bring native private ETH and ERC-20 transfers to the base layer.

The proposal calls for the pool to be deployed as a system contract using a UTXO-based design with no admin key, proxy, or pause mechanism. Spends would be verified via a fork-managed Groth16 BN254 proof.

Lehman’s rationale centers on a structural flaw in existing privacy solutions. New pools cannot offer meaningful anonymity without a critical mass of users, and cannot attract those users without anonymity already in place. Competition among pools fragments anonymity sets, weakening privacy guarantees for participants, he said.

EIP-8182 would give every wallet and application on Ethereum a single shared pool to build on. Sends work to any existing Ethereum address or ENS name, with no separate privacy-specific address format required.

Hegota

Three Hegota-targeted proposals now seek to address connected problems in the same privacy infrastructure stack.

EIP-8141 allows privacy pools to pay withdrawal fees from the withdrawn funds. EIP-8250 adds keyed nonces to unblock shared-sender privacy designs.

Hegota is Ethereum's planned H2 2026 upgrade, a portmanteau of execution-layer client "Bogota" and consensus-layer client "Heze," as The Block reported in December. Developers formally added FOCIL, the censorship-resistance mechanism, as the upgrade's consensus-layer headliner in February, a move Vitalik Buterin called part of building a "cypherpunk principled" Ethereum.