How Will the Pectra Upgrade Affect Ethereum’s User Experience?

Ethereum’s upcoming network upgrade, Pectra, is next on the network’s roadmap after the successful Hoodi fork on March 26. Pectra will not only enhance Ethereum’s performance but will also improve the user experience with self-custodial wallets.

The upgraded wallets can function similarly to smart wallets, which implement features such as passkey support, chain abstraction, and transaction bundling, which will also remove the need to manually approve tokens prior to swapping them or depositing them into a dApp.

This externally owned account (EOA) upgrade is labelled as EIP-7702 and prioritizes flexibility within wallets. The improvement protocol will also introduce features like sponsored transactions, which can create a fee-less transaction environment where a third party, such as the parent dApp, covers the user’s gas fee.

The wallet user experience on Ethereum has been a major point of contention in the onchain community, especially following the rise of Solana, where many users were first exposed to approval transaction bundling. The upgrade coming to Ethereum will remove this point of friction and herald a simple but meaningful change for power users.

Wallet providers such as Metamask are expected to offer Pectra compatibility on day one.

Pectra is tentatively scheduled for April 30 and will be confirmed at the All Core Devs Execution (ACDE) meeting next week, according to Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation.

The upgrade features 11 EIPs in total, which will also provide upgrades for validators and network security.

Prioritizing the user experience may be one step forward for Ethereum in its battle to regain users from other Layer 1s. However, the promise of an upgrade has not made a noticeable dent in the market’s interpretation of ETH.

The ETH/BTC ratio is trading at 0.022, its lowest level since May 2020, while the SOL/ETH ratio trades at 0.07, a 55% increase compared to 0.045 at the beginning of 2024.