Ethereum’s third major upgrade is approaching

The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to be implemented in the first quarter of 2025. This is the third major upgrade of Ethereum, following the Ethereum merger in September 2022 and the Cancun upgrade in March 2024.

During the Ethereum core developer conference call on January 9, 2025, Tim Beiko, head of execution layer technical protocol support, suggested launching the Phase 5 Development Network (Devnet 5) process for the Pactra upgrade during the week of January 13 , and can upgrade Ethereum's public testnets Sepoila and Holesky in February 2025, and activate on the mainnet in March 2025.

About Pectra upgrade

The Pectra upgrade consists of two main parts: Prague execution layer upgrade and 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 optimizing the Layer2 technical protocol, which is also the highlight of this Pectra upgrade worth looking forward to.

• Technical protocols related to consensus layer upgrade include:

EIP-6110, EIP-7002, EIP-7251, EIP-7549, EIP-7691.

• Technical agreements related to execution layer upgrades include:

EIP-7685, EIP-7623, EIP-7702, EIP-2537, EIP-2935.

How the Pectra upgrade could improve Ethereum

According to the EIP-7600 Pectra hard fork process implementation agreement, the Ethereum improvement protocols that have been included in the Pectra upgrade include:

EIP-6110: Use in-protocol deposit handling on the consensus layer

• When a validator deposits ETH, there is no need to rely on the voting mechanism of the consensus layer for verification, thereby improving the security of the validator's operation. Even if there are more than two-thirds of hostile equity pledges, honest nodes can handle it. At the same time, this mechanism can reduce the complexity of client software design and reduce operation delays.

EIP-7002: Triggering withdrawal from execution layer (Withdrawal)

• Allows validators to pull through the execution layer, and credentials trigger exits and pulls.

EIP-7251: Increase MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE

• Ethereum is allowed to pledge more than 32 ETH, and the minimum pledge threshold has not changed and is still 32 ETH. Improvements to the technical protocol are 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 committee index out of proof

• It aims to achieve more efficient consensus vote aggregation and reduce verification costs and network load.

EIP-7691: Increase blob count

• Increase the number of blobs per block to up to 6~9 to help Ethereum improve scalability through Layer 2 solutions.

EIP-7685: Generic execution layer requests

• The proposal defines a common framework for storing contract trigger requests, which can simplify the addition of new request types without changing the structure of the execution block (Execution Block), ultimately creating a more secure system for users.

EIP-7623: Increase calldata cost

• The limit on Ethereum block gas fees has not increased since the implementation of the EIP-1599 proposal, but the amount of data released to the mainnet has continued to increase, the average size of blocks has also continued to increase, and since the implementation of EIP-2028, the cost of calldata This has not changed, but after the introduction of Blobs in EIP-4844, the cost of calldata needs to be re-evaluated to reduce the data size of the largest block and free up data space for more Blobs that can help improve block throughput.

EIP-7702: Set EOA account code

• Add a new type tx to add code execution capabilities to EOA accounts to improve the account's flexibility and programmability.

EIP-2537: Precompilation of BLS12-381 curve operations

• By introducing precompiled contracts (Precompiles) and adding support for BLS12-381 curve operations to Ethereum, encryption algorithm BLS signature verification can be implemented and multiple signatures can be aggregated into one signature, thereby reducing the complexity of verification.

EIP-2935: Save historical block hashes in state

• By storing the latest 8192 block hashes in the system contract, it provides support for the stateless client model and provides a more flexible historical block hash query function. These hashes can be queried directly through the contract and provided to stateless clients as witness bundles.

However, the technical proposal EIP-7594, which attracted 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.