The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to be implemented in the first quarter of 2025. This is the third major upgrade of Ethereum after the Ethereum merge in September 2022 and the Cancun upgrade in March 2024.
In the Ethereum core developer conference call held on January 9, 2025, Tim Beiko, head of technical protocol support for the execution layer, suggested that the 5th development network (Devnet 5) process for the Pactra upgrade be launched this week on January 13, and that Ethereum's public testnets Sepoila and Holesky can be upgraded in February 2025, and activated on the mainnet in March 2025.
About the Pectra upgrade
The Pectra upgrade consists of two main parts: the Prague execution layer upgrade and the Electra consensus layer upgrade. The key proposals in this technical upgrade are to enhance account abstraction, optimize validator operations, and continue to improve the performance of the Ethereum network. It also includes technical protocols for optimizing Layer2, which is also a highlight worth looking forward to in this Pectra upgrade.
The technical protocols related to the consensus layer upgrade include:
EIP-6110, EIP-7002, EIP-7251, EIP-7549, EIP-7691.
The technical protocols related to the execution layer upgrade include:
EIP-7685, EIP-7623, EIP-7702, EIP-2537, EIP-2935.
How does the Pectra upgrade improve Ethereum?
According to the EIP-7600 Pectra hard fork process implementation agreement, the Ethereum improvement agreements currently included in the Pectra upgrade include:
EIP-6110: Use the deposit processing mechanism within the protocol on the consensus layer
When the validator deposits ETH, it no longer needs to rely on the voting mechanism verification of the consensus layer, thereby improving the security of the validator's operation. Even if there are more than two-thirds of hostile stakes, honest nodes can cope with it. At the same time, this mechanism can reduce the complexity of client software design and reduce operation delays.
EIP-7002: Withdrawal from the Execution Layer
EIP-7251:Increase MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE
Allow Ethereum to stake more than 32 ETH, and the minimum stake threshold has not changed, still 32 ETH. The improvement of this technical protocol is designed to allow large node operators to reduce the number of validators in the network by merging multiple validators, thereby reducing peer-to-peer messaging, signature aggregation, and storage burdens.
EIP-7549: Move the Committee Index out of the proof
EIP-7691: Increase the number of blobs
EIP-7685: General Execution Layer Requests
This proposal defines a general framework for storing contract trigger requests, which simplifies the addition of new request types without changing the structure of the execution block, ultimately creating a safer system for users.
EIP-7623: Increase the cost of calldata
Since the implementation of the EIP-1599 proposal, the limit on Ethereum block gas fees has not increased, but the amount of data released to the mainnet has continued to increase, and the average size of blocks has also continued to increase. Since the implementation of EIP-2028, the cost of calldata has not changed, but since EIP-4844 introduced Blobs, the cost of calldata needs to be re-evaluated to reduce the data size of the maximum block and make room for more Blobs that can help improve block throughput.
EIP-7702: Set EOA account code
EIP-2537:Precompilation of BLS12-381 curve operations
By introducing precompiled contracts (Precompiles), support for BLS12-381 curve operations is added to Ethereum, which can implement encryption algorithm BLS signature verification and allow multiple signatures to be aggregated into one signature, thereby reducing the complexity of verification.
EIP-2935: Save historical block hashes in the state
However, the technical proposal EIP-7594, which received more attention in the early days, has been suspended for more than 6 months and is not expected to be implemented in the Pectra upgrade. EIP-7594 introduces the Data Availability Sampling (DAS) protocol to ensure that Blob data is available when only a subset of the data is downloaded.
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