Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade Just Went Live — What Does It Do?

Pectra has just officially gone live, per an official post from the Ethereum Foundation today, May 7.

The largest fork since The Merge, which changed Ethereum from a proof-of-work to proof-of-stake blockchain, the Pectra upgrade is a bundle of 11 major code changes, known as Ethereum Improvement Proposals, or EIPs.

Speaking on an official Ethereum livestream leading up to the upgrade this morning, long-time Ethereum contributor and active community leader, Pooja Ranjan, noted that Pectra is the 19th upgrade to Ethereum since 2015. It's also the third upgrade since the Merge in 2022, following the smaller Dencun upgrade last year, which introduced blobs.

Pectra is a mash-up of Prague and Electra, two upgrades happening simultaneously on the Ethereum execution and consensus layers, respectively. It was originally scheduled for 2024 but its evident complexity delayed it until the first quarter of 2025. But after the first two testnets failed in late February and into March, the creation of a third testnet required further delay.

As Ethereum contributors and community members explained on the livestream, the contents of the upgrade can be grouped into three areas: account abstraction, validator user experience improvements, and blob scaling.

Account abstraction — adding smart contracts to wallets

As part of the Pectra upgrade, EIP-7702 gives wallets smart contract capability, known as “account abstraction,” according to an Ethereum Foundation blog post. It will allow the addition of user-friendly features like allowing sponsored transactions in which a third party, like a dApp, can pay a user’s gas fee.

The upgraded wallets will implement features like passkey-based authentication and transaction bundling — something found in Solana — which will remove the need to manually approve tokens before they are swapped or deposited into a dApp.

It can also limit how many tokens a specific app can spend or cap daily outflows from a wallet.

Validator UX improvements

There are three EIPs included in Pectra that improve the user experience of validators, per the Ethereum Foundation's official post.

EIP-7251 makes the staking experience easier and potentially more profitable for validators. With the Pectra upgrade, validators can now increase the maximum effective balance of ETH that they can stake from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. This means that validators who want to stake large amounts of ETH don’t have to run as many nodes, instead consolidating them into one — or at least far fewer —nodes. This will allow validators to deploy less hardware to stake, validate and earn rewards.

There are currently more than one million validators, a number that can bring excessive latency that can bog down the network. By combining 75 nodes into one, this should help alleviate that problem.

EIP-7002 introduces execution layer triggerable withdrawals that allow validators to use Ethereum addresses for withdrawals, rather than requiring an active signing key to trigger an exit. This allows trustless staking pools and removes reliance on intermediaries for withdrawals and rewards.

EIP-6110 removes a leftover from The Merge, the delay between validator deposits and their addition to the deposit queue, cutting deposit delays from nine hours to about 13 minutes.

Blob scaling

Included in Pectra is EIP-7691, a proposal that doubles Ethereum’s blob throughput from three blobs with a maximum of six during periods of high demand to six, with a maximum of nine to accommodate periods of high demand, according to the Ethereum Foundation. Blobs are temporary data storage, in which Layer-2 (L2) rollups can store data on Ethereum blocks far more cheaply, reducing Layer-1 gas fees for L2s by 10x to 100x. This will cut network congestion and improve transaction speeds, according to a summary of the upgrade from Coinbase.

EIP-7623 raises calldata fees to incentivize L2s to move to using blobs rather than posting directly to calldata. Calldata refers to the unstructured data attached to transactions. The goal of the EIP is to improve scalability and lower costs for users, according to a report from leading Ethereum infra development firm, ConsenSys.

EIP-7840 standardizes blob scheduling, helping prepare for future Ethereum upgrades that increase the number of blobs, making future scaling smoother, according to Consensys.

Under the hood

There are four other EIPs included in Pectra that aren’t as visible to most users, according to Consensys, but are important under-the-hood improvements.

EIP-7685 is aimed at the compatibility of future upgrades. By creating a standardized execution-layer-to-consensus-layer communications format, this update aims to make future updates more compatible

EIP-7549 moves the committee index outside of attestation, meaning that it strips unnecessary data from consensus messages, cutting bandwidth and storage requirements for validators. It improves performance and helps future-proof the consensus layer.

EIP-2537 makes it less gas-intensive and more practical to perform BLS signature verification cryptographic operations, particularly those used in staking and cross-chain bridges.

EIP-2935 allows smart contracts to access older block hashes by storing them longer. This opens use cases in randomness, proof systems and trustless oracles benefitting developers significantly.

At press time, the price of ETH is up just about 2% on the day, with the leading altcoin trading around $1,840.

As The Defiant reported last month, the Ethereum Foundation has been under increasing pressure to shift strategy, given ETH’s underperformance and what many call record-low sentiment surrounding the blockchain ecosystem. The Foundation's new leadership is looking to shift that sentiment, with Pectra as a major development toward achieving the ultimate goals of its new roadmap for Ethereum.