Ethereum Surges Above $2,000 on Heels of Pectra Upgrade

Ether has reclaimed $2,000 on the heels of its Pectra upgrade, the most expansive since the Merge made it a proof-of-stake blockchain.

Ethereum jumped 15% on May 8, breaching the psychologically important $2,000 level for the first time since March 27. ETH reached $2,071 before retreating slightly to $2,046, but remains almost 50% below its early December high of just over $4,000.

Despite some damp palms among developers, the upgrade went off without a hitch at epoch 364032 on May 7. Pectra had been delayed after the first two testnet deployments faced issues, forcing the creation of a third.

“Ethereum is this living organism, and it's really beautiful to see it upgrade and improve,” said Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake on a livestream of developers watching Pectra go live.

Still, like many on the call, Drake didn’t take long celebrating, instead jumping right into what comes next.

“Right now we basically have these two tracks of improvement,” he said. “On the one hand, we have these forks every few months, for example every six months, that will make it a firm, let’s say, 20% better.”

On the other hand, he added, there is a “from-scratch approach”—instead of having “many 20% improvements compounding on each other, we might have one massive 10x or 100x improvement. The good news is that we can have these two tracks in parallel.”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was also all business.

Asked about the Ethereum Foundation’s simplified three-pronged roadmap of scaling the Layer 1, scaling blobs and improving the user experience, Buterin said, “these are the big themes of, I would say, 2025 and 2026 and also beyond.”

He then got down to technical details about the short-term improvements coming down the pipeline, including increasing the Layer 1 gas limit, allowing developers to increase the number of transactions per block, and boosting throughput.