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How Ethereum changes, and what’s next

Lesson 8 of 8
By the end of this lesson you’ll know how a change gets into Ethereum and who has to agree, where the roadmap stands as of 6 November 2026, and what two of the largest thefts of 2025 say about where the risk to your money actually sits.
A collage of a train crossing a railway viaduct over a dark gorge. Each pier is built differently: stone, brick, timber, iron and one in blue. The blue pier has snapped, its lower half fallen far below, and the deck stays level without it.

How a change becomes an upgrade

Nobody owns Ethereum, so changes travel through a public process. It starts with an Ethereum Improvement Proposal, “a design document providing information to the Ethereum community” that describes a new feature or process. Anyone can write one; “Anyone within the Ethereum community has the ability to create an EIP.”

Proposal
Anyone can write an EIP
↓
AllCoreDevs call
The client teams agree to include it
↓
Test networks
Sepolia and Hoodi
↓
Mainnet date
Announced on the Ethereum Foundation blog
↓
Final
The last status, once clients have implemented it

Core EIPs change the rules every node follows and need a network upgrade; EIP-1559 is one. ERCs set application standards, such as the token standards in lesson 4.

Each moves through statuses: Draft, Review, Last Call, which is a final review window of “typically 14 days,” then Final. A Core EIP can’t reach Final until clients have implemented it: EIP-7702 went Final a month after Pectra reached mainnet. Both of Glamsterdam’s headline changes, EIP-7732 and EIP-7928, were still in Last Call on 6 November 2026, past their 1 November deadline.

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