It has gone through three major upgrades in the last few years
Pectra’s testnet was activated in February this year
Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade is expected to be completed by April 30
Photo Credit: Unsplash/ Shubham Dhiman
Ethereum, touted as the most commercial blockchain in existence, is set to undergo a significant upgrade in the coming days. Dubbed “Pectra”, the upgrade is aimed at improving Ethereum's efficiency, stability, and usability. Initially, the upgrade was slated to be completed around early April, however, owing to the ongoing tests on the upgrade its deployment has been pushed by some days. According to Tim Beiko, who runs the core protocol meetings for Ethereum, the upgrade could be completed by April 30.
Pectra's introduction to Ethereum will improve the blockchain's ability to augment accounts and upgrade the experience for its validators, as per an official blog from Ethereum. It will also expand Ethereum's scalability range for the supported Layer-2 blockchains like Arbitrum, Base, and Polygon among others.
Some Key Highlights
With Pectra, Ethereum users will be able to replace traditional private key-controlled accounts with programmable smart contracts for greater flexibility and security. This will notably advance Ethereum's “account abstraction” features.
Explaining the feature, Ethereum said it represented “a major step toward widespread account abstraction, enabling users to enhance their Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) with smart contract functionality.
“This hybrid approach combines the simplicity of EOAs with the programmability of contract-based accounts,” the blog post read.
Through the feature, users will be able to execute multiple operations within a single transaction. This will eliminate the need to execute separate transactions for transaction approvals and token swapping.
Another significant feature that will come with Pectra is the “Gas Sponsorship”. Essentially, users will be able to process gas fee payments through other crypto tokens instead of accepting only ETH tokens.
For network validators, Pectra will introduce profitable rewards. “Pectra raises the maximum balance a validator can receive rewards on from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, through an opt-in update of withdrawal credential type. For smaller stakers, this enables automatic reward compounding. Both existing and new validators can be configured to earn rewards on the entirety of their stake, up to 2048 ETH per validator,” the network explained.
Beiko has posted more details on the upcoming upgrade on X.
EIPs 6110, 7002 and 7251 improve validator UX by removing the delay between deposits on the EL and the CL queue (a PoW artifact), allowing EL addresses to trigger withdrawals (reduced trust assumptions) and increasing validators' max effective balance (compounding rewards!) pic.twitter.com/X5PyAmJAGr
The word "Pectra" has been explained as the combination of Prague, the location of Devcon IV, and Electra, a blue-white giant star in the constellation of Taurus. Its testnet was activated on February 24.
Previous Ethereum Upgrades
In March 2024, Ethereum had undergone the Dencun upgrade. It was aimed at lowering the expenses for the Ethereum-supported Layer 2 networks.
Before that, Ethereum had completed its Shanghai upgrade in April 2023. That upgrade started allowing validators to withdraw their staked ETH tokens on the PoS network.
In 2022, Ethereum saw one of its biggest upgrades when its consensus shifted from energy-intensive Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism to the eco-friendly Proof of Stake (PoS). This upgrade was called the “Merge”.
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