Deciphering Ethereum’s next major upgrade: Pectra

Written by: William M. Peaster, Bankless

Compiled by: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

Ethereum has been moving forward.

In March 2024, the network rolled out the Dencun upgrade. Dencun is a fusion of "Deneb" and "Cancun", aiming to significantly reduce L2 transaction costs.

What happens next? Pectra is the next big upgrade to Ethereum, and it will be even more important than Dencun.

Scheduled to launch in Q4 2024 or Q1 2025, Pectra combines two previously planned upgrades: Prague (for the execution layer) and Electra (for the consensus layer). With the merger, Pectra aims to bring several ambitious improvements to Ethereum, making it more flexible and optimized than ever before.

What does Pectra contain?

Pectra is not just a small upgrade, it is full of updates.

An Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) is a proposed modification to Ethereum. They ensure that network changes are discussed and agreed upon transparently, and involve the community and core developers.

For the Pectra upgrade, there are currently plans to incorporate 9 standard EIPs and a meta-EIP consisting of 11 additional component EIPs.

These EIPs include enhancements to account abstraction, validator operations, and overall network performance. Some of the most noteworthy new features are as follows.

• EIP-2537 — Introduces precompilation of BLS12-381 curve operations, making BLS signing operations faster and cheaper, improving accessibility and performance for Ethereum validators and reducing gas cost.
• EIP-2935 — Implement saving hashes of previous blocks in special storage slots to improve efficiency and reliability of validating Ethereum data before stateless execution.
• EIP-7002 — Allows validators to trigger exits and partial withdrawals via their execution layer withdrawal credentials, providing more flexible options for restaking and staking pools.
• EIP-7251 — Increases the maximum valid balance for Ethereum validators from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, reducing the total number of validators required and simplifying the network’s computational load.
• EIP-7594 — Introducing Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) to further optimize L2 and enhance transaction processing and scalability.
• EIP-7702 — Add a new transaction type that sets the code for an EOA (Externally Owned Account) during a transaction, allowing a normal wallet to be temporarily converted into a smart contract wallet to improve user experience.
• EIP-7692 — Meta-EIP consisting of 11 component EIPs designed to enhance the EVM Object Format (EOF) to improve contract deployment and execution efficiency.

New and Improved Ethereum

In the post-Pectra era, Ethereum will meet a wider range of use cases and user needs.

Regular Ethereum accounts will be more programmable, L2 will be more affordable, smart contracts will be more efficient, and validators will be more flexibly managed!

With these enhancements, Ethereum will be better able to handle growing adoption, integrate with other networks, and introduce new features to keep the platform at the forefront of on-chain innovation.

What happens after Pectra?

While nothing is final yet, the Ethereum community is focusing on implementing Verkle trees in the Osaka upgrade after Pectra.

"I'm really looking forward to the Verkle tree," Vitalik said earlier this year. "They will enable stateless validator clients, which will allow staking nodes to run with almost zero hard drive space and sync almost instantly - a better individual staking user experience."

Having said that, Each of Ethereum’s next upgrades will significantly improve the chain’s usability for users and developers. Ethereum can't be built in a day, but when it comes to building the future-proof network of everything Ethereum is enabling, slow and steady is the way to go.

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