Facet co-founder Tom Lehman has proposed EIP-8182 for Ethereum’s upcoming Hegota upgrade, advancing a draft that would introduce private ETH and ERC-20 transfers through a protocol-managed shielded pool. The EIP was created on March 3, 2026, and is currently marked as a Draft Standards Track Core proposal, meaning it remains under review rather than approved for inclusion.
Unchained reported on May 26, 2026, that Lehman pitched the proposal for Hegota inclusion, framing it as a way to reduce the fragmentation seen across app-layer privacy tools. The proposal’s central thesis is a single shared anonymity set at the protocol level, instead of separate privacy pools competing for users and liquidity.
Shielded Pool Would Be Fork-Managed
EIP-8182 would deploy a shielded-pool system contract at the fixed address 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000081820. The draft specifies no proxy, no admin function and no on-chain upgrade mechanism, with future changes possible only through Ethereum hard forks.
The design uses UTXO-like notes, a note-commitment tree, nullifiers and an auth-policy registry to support private transfers. The EIP says spending would rely on a fork-managed Groth16 BN254 pool proof verified by the system contract, plus an auth proof checked through a user-registered verifier contract.
One technical point needs correction from some secondary summaries: the EIP itself says that, beyond installing the system contract at fork activation, it introduces no new precompile, opcode or transaction type. That means the current draft should not be described as requiring a separate new ZK proof-verification precompile unless the proposal is later revised.
Proposal Remains Short of Final Inclusion
The privacy proposal is being discussed alongside other Hegota-focused work. Unchained reported that EIP-8182 is one of three privacy-related EIPs targeting Hegota, alongside EIP-8141 and EIP-8250, while FOCIL, specified in EIP-7805, has been discussed as a censorship-resistance headliner for the Hegota fork.
FOCIL’s own Ethereum Magicians thread describes it as “currently considered for inclusion” in Hegota and focused on improving transaction inclusion guarantees by involving multiple validators in block building. That places censorship resistance and privacy infrastructure in the same upgrade conversation, but not all candidate EIPs are final protocol commitments.
For users, the intended outcome of EIP-8182 would be private transfers to existing Ethereum addresses or ENS names without a separate privacy-specific address format. For developers, the unresolved question is whether Ethereum should make base-layer privacy a shared protocol primitive or continue relying mainly on application-level privacy systems.
At this stage, EIP-8182 remains a proposal, not an activated feature. The next test is whether Ethereum developers move it deeper into Hegota’s final scope, where privacy, auditability, protocol complexity and wallet integration will all need to be weighed before any hard-fork deployment.