Ethereum developers activate Pectra upgrade, including 11 changes to improve user experience, validator operations and L2 extensions

PANews reported on May 7 that according to The Block, the Ethereum main network successfully activated the Pectra upgrade at 6:05 ET, which is the most important network update after the 2022 merger (The Merge). This hard fork contains 11 EIP improvement proposals, focusing on three major directions: improving staking efficiency, optimizing user experience, and enhancing Layer2 scalability. The successful deployment of testnet Hoodi in March laid the foundation for this upgrade. Pectra lays the foundation for the Fusaka upgrade, which will introduce key technologies such as Verkle Trees and PeerDAS.

The most eye-catching thing in this upgrade is the EIP-7702 account abstract solution, which allows ordinary wallets to temporarily execute smart contract functions. In the future, users can realize innovative experiences such as third-party payment of Gas fees, batch packaging transactions, and even recover lost private keys through social contacts. In terms of pledge mechanism, the upper limit of ETH pledge of a single verification node has been greatly increased from 32 to 2,048, and institutional pledgeers can reduce the complexity of operation and maintenance through node merging. For Layer2 expansion, the Blob data capacity of each block doubled to 6 (9 peaks). Based on the proto-danksharding technology upgraded by Dencun last year, it is expected to reduce the transaction costs of Rollup chains such as Arbitrum by more than 90%. The technical team also solved several long-term pain points: the verification node activation time was shortened from 12 hours to 13 minutes, the execution layer could directly control the node exit to improve key security, and the historical block hash data storage enhances the reliability of the decentralized oracle.