Interpreting the next major upgrade of Ethereum: Pectra

Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless

Compiled by Deng Tong, Golden Finance

Ethereum has been moving forward.

In March 2024, the network launched the Dencun upgrade. Dencun is a fusion of ‘Deneb’ and ‘Cancun’, aimed at significantly reducing L2 transaction costs.

What will happen next? Pectra is the next major upgrade of Ethereum, and it will be more important than Dencun.

Pectra is planned to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2024 or the first quarter of 2025. It combines two previous planned upgrades: Prague (for the execution layer) and Electra (for the consensus layer). By merging them, Pectra aims to bring multiple ambitious improvements to Ethereum, making it more flexible and optimized than ever before.

What does Pectra include?

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

Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) are proposed changes to Ethereum. They ensure that network changes are discussed and agreed upon transparently, involving the community and core developers.

For the Pectra upgrade, the current plan is to include 9 standard EIPs and a meta-EIP composed of an additional 11 EIPs.

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

• EIP-2537 - Introduces precompiles for BLS12-381 curve operations, making BLS signature operations faster and cheaper, thus improving accessibility and performance for Ethereum validators, and reducing gas costs.
• EIP-2935 — Implement saving the hash of previous blocks in special storage slots to improve the efficiency and reliability of verifying Ethereum data before stateless execution.
• EIP-7002 - Allows validators to trigger withdrawals and partial withdrawals by their execution layer, providing more flexible options for re-staking and staking pools.
• EIP-7251 — Increase the maximum effective balance of Ethereum validators from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, reduce the total number of required validators, and simplify the network’s computational load.
• EIP-7594 — Introducing Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) to further optimize L2, enhance transaction processing, and scalability.
• EIP-7702 — Add a new transaction type that allows setting the code for EOA (Externally Owned Account) during a transaction, allowing regular wallets to temporarily convert to smart contract wallets to improve user experience.
• EIP-7692 — A meta-EIP consisting of 11 EIPs, aiming to enhance the EVM Object Format (EOF) to improve contract deployment and execution efficiency.

Improved Ethereum

After the 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 able to better cope with the growing adoption, integrate with other networks, and introduce new features, keeping the platform at the forefront of on-chain innovation.

What will happen after Pectra?

Although nothing is certain at the moment, the Ethereum community is following the potential implementation of Verkle tree in the Osaka upgrade after Pectra.

“I’m really looking forward to Verkle trees,” Vitalik said earlier this year. “They will enable stateless validator clients, allowing staking nodes to run on almost zero hard drive space and sync almost instantly - a better staking user experience.”

That being said, the next upgrade of Ethereum will significantly improve the usability of the chain for users and developers. Ethereum cannot be built in a day, but steady and solid progress is the key to building the future-oriented network that Ethereum is striving to achieve.