Ethereum Rolls Out Pectra, Its ‘Most Ambitious Upgrade Yet’

Ethereum has successfully activated the first phase of Pectra, its latest major upgrade since Dencun in March last year, going live at 6:05am ET in New York on Wednesday.

Following the hard fork itself, developers faced a nail-biting wait to see if the network had achieved finality, which took place at 6:18am ET.

Pectra introduces sweeping changes to the network, laying the foundation for its shift to focus on scaling and improving how the network operates across its growing ecosystem.

The upgrade also optimizes validator deposit processing, enhances cryptographic operations, improves historical data access, opens execution layer exits, and streamlines attestation efficiency, among other improvements.

"This is the most ambitious upgrade yet,” Preston Van Loon, Ethereum Core developer and co-founder of Prysmatic Labs, told Decrypt. “The impact will be especially powerful in Layer 2 and Layer 3 environments, where developers can design experiences where the user doesn’t even need to think about wallets or gas.”

Van Loon is referring to one of the most critical changes adopted, EIP-7702, which brings features that make crypto wallets and accounts more straightforward to use. It allows regular user accounts to temporarily function as smart contracts without requiring users to change their addresses.

"EIP-7702 lays the foundation we've needed for a long time," Van Loon said. "While full abstraction won't be immediately available to end users with Pectra, this upgrade gives Ethereum the infrastructure to support it moving forward."

While it took some time to get live after developers fought, stalled, and struggled with technical hurdles, the Pectra Upgrade adopts a number of other improvements, with the next steps for the Fusaka upgrade expected to make Ethereum "as simple as Bitcoin."

The improvement in account abstraction brings in key features such as batching, gas sponsorship, and permission management.

"We expect DeFi apps will quickly adopt it to cut down on complexity for end-users, Sam McIngvale, head of product at OP Labs, told Decrypt. "Account abstraction will reshape user experiences by eliminating token approvals and creating a one-click trading experience. The more friction DeFi apps can remove."

Staking limits lifted

Pectra brings in another key change to how staking works in Ethereum with EIP-7251, which lifts limits for validators and allows them to stake up to 2,048 ETH instead of just 32 ETH.

The proposal updates staking rules, making rewards more efficient and easing the management of multiple validators.

Those efficiencies mainly benefit "early stakers or those just above the 32 ETH threshold, turning otherwise idle capital into productive capital," Van Loon explains.

Blobs for building

The Pectra Upgrade also sees another significant change adopted with EIP-7691, which increases blob throughput from 3 to 6 per block.

A blob (Binary Large OBject) is a dedicated data structure that stores large amounts of data on the consensus layer rather than the execution layer, making Layer 2 transactions cheaper.

The change follows last year's Dencun upgrade and lets rollups handle more transactions at lower costs. With Pectra, the pricing system now adjusts more smoothly to changes in usage, resulting in smaller fee increases for full blocks.

“Pectra indeed has the potential to lead to higher usage of Ethereum," Muriel Médard, MIT professor and co-founder of Optimum, told Decrypt. "Some of the scaling issues remain, however, or might even be worsened.”

She continued: “Reducing decentralization is not a means to scale. On the contrary, decentralization is necessary for scaling.”

While users would benefit from the upgrade, validators would need to handle larger volumes, potentially requiring more bandwidth and storage resources.

"Ethereum's ability to propagate data efficiently and predictably will define how far it can scale," Médard said.

Still, expanding Ethereum to the masses remains an uphill battle until some of the finer details can be worked out among the developer class.

"Scalability remains Ethereum’s most critical challenge. What Layer 2s most fundamentally need is more scale," OP Labs' McIngvale said.

"At current growth trajectories, even with Pectra’s modest blob increase, Layer 2s need a five-to-eight times increase in blob capacity for blobs to remain uncongested."

"We’re excited for Fusaka to tackle this challenge, and Optimism is already dedicating engineering resources to support PeerDAS," he said.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair