The tally closes, which is the first thing to check in a document like this: two must-ship, 15 expected to ship, eight still candidates, seven below the line but not ruled out, 28 declined and two held back for mainnet data adds to exactly 62 [1][9][10][11]. So 28 declines is 45% of the candidate set told to go away for this fork [2], and adding the seven parked below the line puts 56% of what was proposed outside Hegota unless something moves [3].
The 397 grades sound like saturation until you divide them: twelve of the sixteen contribution templates carried actual tier grades [12], blanket coverage would therefore have produced 744, and 397 is 53% of that [4]. That is deliberate, since several contributors graded only the EIPs where they held deep expertise [12], which makes the average of 6.4 grades per EIP, and the nine on the most contested items [13], a map of where attention pooled rather than a measure of consensus breadth. Geth will still publish its own standalone execution-layer list [14].
The date doing the real work here is December 2029, when the cluster wants the base layer quantum-resistant across execution, consensus and data, a target it says matches migration plans set independently by Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft [15]. Fusaka went live on December 3, 2025 [23], Glamsterdam is planned for December 2026 [18], and the cluster says reaching 2029 from there requires an average of 7.2 months per fork through a fifth upgrade it calls L* [18]. Five forks at 7.2 months is 36 months, which lands exactly on the target [6], and it is a 40% compression on the roughly twelve months between Fusaka and Glamsterdam [5]. Client teams could realistically begin Hegota implementation in late Q4 2026 [22], which is to say while Glamsterdam is still shipping [8].
So the tier list, or rather the more interesting version of it, is a schedule with grades attached: an S means the calendar bends before the scope does [4], and the calendar is anchored to a Q-day the Foundation itself calls a deliberately aggressive assumption, conceding that the most credible estimates put cryptography-breaking machines later, if they arrive at all [16]. Spending 28 declines [9] against a date you have labelled aggressive is a reasonable trade when the cost of being late is unbounded and the outside review is already booked for January 2027 [17]. The counter-read has evidence in the same document: FOCIL, filed as EIP-7805 and the one clean S in Cryptopolitan's account, is a censorship-resistance feature about getting an eligible transaction included without leaning on centralized block builders [7][8], not a post-quantum one, and the B-tier gates of prototype, sign-off and settled specification [5] test readiness rather than sequencing. If inclusion is decided by those gates, 2029 is context rather than cause.
What a builder gets from this is a grade instead of a per-team thread [2], plus a scope signal on privacy, since the cluster says that work should start in Hegota to deliver native, trustless, censorship resistant private transactions on L1 [20]. What the coverage does not yield is the identity of the second locked-in item: Cryptopolitan reports FOCIL as the only clean S [7], Cointelegraph counts two must-ship EIPs [10]. One of the two has no name yet.
