The underlying architecture has been established. Where is the developer ready to go?

Source: OKX Ventures **
Important points**

• Pectra (Prague + Electra) is the largest hard fork bundling upgrade since The Merge, with 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) designed to synchronize reducing data costs, simplify smart account operations and optimize validator operations.

• EIP-7691 doubled the Blob target capacity to 6 and increased the hard cap to 9. This reduced the Gas charges for L1 data availability (DA) to below about 1 Gwei, and the redemption charges on major L2s were briefly reduced to below about 0.02 USD.

• Every externally owned account (EOA) can now be converted into a smart account via a single transaction (EIP-7702), enabling Gas fee sponsorship, stablecoin payments, and batch user experience without contract migration.

• The validator cap is increased to 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251), which significantly cuts DevOps costs for large operators without significantly affecting decentralization.

• PeerDAS will be the next step in the Fusaka upgrade, which is much more important to Roll-up than any single EIP in Pectra.

OKX Ventures ’ view : Pectra itself is not a “turning point in modular data availability (DA)”; it is the last key puzzle that allows L2 to attract mass market users while Ethereum maintains its settlement dominance. The winners of the future will be those (a) externalizing all user experiences through 7702-style accounts, (b) using the benefits of Blob to drive new data- intensive verticals (on-chain AI, order book DEX, content storage), and (c) double down on the stack that proves compression technology before PeerDAS.

OKX Ventures held a Twitter Space event on May 13, inviting guests who are directly involved in code writing or infrastructure operations after the fork to dive into these changes.

In this event, OKX Ventures and those who have to deliver code or run hardware after the fork goes live, took a scrutiny of these changes:

• Derek Lee – Offchain Labs Core Agreement Product Manager

• Leonardo Lerer – Core Product Manager, StarkWare

• Qi Zhou – Co-founder of EthStorage

• Pok Kopp – Co-founder of Ether.fi

• Esme Zheng – OKX Ventures Investor

**1. In the first week, who changed direction and who felt the shock

wave?**

Arbitrum – Derek does not need to rewrite any code, but every Arbitrum instance must upgrade its embedded Geth client. The only EIP he really cares about is 7691: Double the Blob target capacity means more low-cost space for DEX and game users.

Pectra post-progress:

• BoLD's licenseless fraud certificate has entered the test network in April and plans to go online "before the fourth quarter".

• Stylus compiles hundreds of Rust/C contracts per day—the llama.cpp reasoning and real-time chess engine are examples Derek shows.

• TimeBoost has replaced the "first price auction" mechanism in the Arbitrum sorter memory pool, improving the fairness of transaction inclusion.

Starknet – Leo Pectra has mainly adjusted Starknet’s Blob cost model; Cairo 1.x’s fee schedule remains the same. The bigger shift lies in StarkWare's own roadmap: The reduction in L1 data availability (DA) costs reduces urgency for "voluntary choice" (Volition, or selective off-chain data) and redirects attention to stateless client research.

Decentralization milestones:

• Staking v2 (proof of reward by block) will be released this quarter.

• Sorter as a Service (v0.14) – a 3f + 1 Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) cluster – will be available in 2025; cheaper blobs may allow them to shorten the proof generation cycle without increasing fees.

EthStorage – Qi Zhou’s higher blob activity is a boon – his storage layer now plans to provide continuous incentives when Ethereum drops data in two weeks. Pectra also forced a full fleet-wide Geth upgrade; a group of operators using v1.13.8 was frozen in the mid-epoch.

Shockwave:

• Node Operator: Within 48 hours, 732 validators increased the staking to more than 32 ETH.

• Roll-up User: As the Blob Gas fee falls to about 1 Gwei, the redemption fee on the main L2 drops below two cents, despite the memory pool fluctuations.

• Infrastructure Developer: The fast point version of Go-Ethereum is released, keeping all developers running archive nodes highly alert.

OKX Ventures’ view : Cheap blobs, one-time accounts and larger validators are not headline features; they are the basic “pipelines” that will allow the next headline feature to be successfully implemented. PeerDAS will soon verify this conclusion.

2. EIP in-depth analysis

Large-scale intelligent account (EIP-7702)

EIP-7702 allows any externally owned account (EOA) to behave as a smart account in a single transaction, inheriting batch call, Gas sponsorship, and stablecoin payment capabilities without contract migration.

Starknet has been in the AA (Account Abstraction) world since the Genesis Block. Leo gives an example: Productivity application FocusTree quietly deploys an account for each mobile user and begins minting achievements NFTs supported by sponsorship fees. The user didn't even notice that they were operating on the chain.

EthStorage will use pay-masters to fund users’ first ten transactions—for example, deploying personal websites with one click through Blob.

Arbitrum already has GMX, Camelot, and Plays integrated 7702 processes through third-party AA providers. Derek expects the first direct indicator improvement to be transaction success rate and failed redemption refunds, followed by a second wave of Web2 native user import channels.

OKX Ventures Perspective: 7702 Eliminates the ultimate self-hosted user experience barrier. Areas that can be invested are those payers who perform Gas arbitrage between different tokens and chains, and secure middleware that enforces spending restrictions and fraud rules at the AA layer.

Cheaper data (EIP-7691)

Arbitrum: Every Roll-up competes for the same blob pool; double capacity just “provides breathing space before congestion pricing takes effect.”

Starknet only publishes status differences; cheaper blobs don't unlock new features, but reduces the total cost per transaction and helps avoid a shift to "voluntary selection" (selective off-chain data).

EthStorage estimates that the new capacity (about 3 TB every 12 days) finally makes it possible to fix static websites less than 100 MB, including vitalik.ca, fully stored in the blob. It should be noted that the Gas fees for on-chain transactions are now a bottleneck and usually exceed the long-term storage costs. Qi is pushing block-level access lists and higher Gas restrictions to mitigate this constraint.

OKX Ventures’ view: The focus of data is redirecting to the chain; the recent potential market (TAM) is non-financial blob native content (AI reasoning weights, game assets, social graphs), and if there is a search incentive, they can tolerate blob expiration. Long-term tail search and proof markets will become critical infrastructure.

Verifier cap 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251)

Data Points: So far, only 732/1,000,000 validators have increased staking – no centralized panic has occurred.

Arbitrum & Starknet: Pure operational victory—lower DevOps costs, minimal impact on users. Theoretically, the risk of confiscation for each validator has increased, but Leo believes it is a "interesting academic question" rather than a practical obstacle.

EthStorage: allows running hot/cold validator copies without increasing infrastructure spending; makes large-scale blob proofs more reliable. Qi highlights the operational advantages of staking services: fewer equipment, the same benefits, and running hot standby validators without double the hardware budget.

OKX Ventures Insight: Hardware cost savings will flow to the restake and shared security markets rather than directly to end users; EigenLayer-style protocols will absorb the released liquidity. More idle ETH → More security capacity.

3. Pectra post-roadmap signal

PeerDAS (Fusaka Hard Fork , EIP-7623)

Each speaker uses the same adjective: existentiality . Derek calls it "critical and non-negotiable" - Offchain Labs has Prism engineers involved in the specification discussion because Arbitrum's fraudulent proof throughput is ultimately limited by DA bandwidth. Leo sees PeerDAS as the “foundation of the entire L2 roadmap”; once the sampling goes live, he can increase the proof frequency of Starknet without worrying about Blob fees. Qi has written an economic foundation for that world—EthStorage will incentivize payments to peers to continue to maintain its availability after the protocol forgets to sample the blob.

Verkle tree and historical data expire

Qi believes that these two paths are complementary. The Verkle tree reduces the witness data size and enables stateless clients; historical data expires to reduce half of the disk space of the full node by discarding old blocks. He estimates that it will save about 50% of storage space, but that is limited to the existence of a search market—Portal + EthStorage—who pays someone to save cold data. Leo is less concerned with savings, but more concerned with the functionality unlocked by the Verkle tree: a phone that can verify Ethereum in an out-of-sync state. He wanted to observe how the Beacon client handled stateless mode before porting the idea to Starknet.

SSZ Object Trading (EIP-6404 Series )

Qi is leading the first public test network. The promises are: smaller witness data, faster decoding, and perfect alignment with the Verkle tree object hash model. Derek is currently agnostic (“Roll-up can absorb any format”), while Starknet is just monitoring – Cairo has already serialized with its own field element layout.

Contract size 128 KB (EIP-7907)

If you ever split a monomer application into 24 KB pieces, you will understand the pain. Qi and Curve's development teams are leading the patch, but the barrier is not a consensus - it is to target very large deployment transactions, requiring a DDoS-proof Gas meter.

Block-level access list

Qi's benchmarks show that parallel preload status can reduce Geth's IO wait time by about 70%. This in turn proves the rationality of increasing Gas restrictions, thus directly reducing the release cost of Blobs. He is collecting mainnet tracking data to prove this trade-off.

OKX Ventures Insight: Pectra is a “comfortable” release; the next twelve months will focus on data availability, stateless verification, and ultimately provide developers with space to deploy large, complex contracts without the need to make workarounds.

4. Macro picture - How will all this expand the moat?

The core indicator worth paying attention to is settlement value . Leo expects the compound growth curve of L2 throughput to surpass all other key performance indicators (KPIs), and he believes: "Every Roll-up will bring its own exponential growth." If this statement holds, all these settlement layers anchored by L2 - Ethereum - will capture the entire flywheel effect.

Developer retention rates seem to be finally getting healthy. Qi's touchstone lies in the trials of the Web2 team for AA wallets and subsidized blobs - both of which did not exist in a credible form six months ago.

The security budget is about to be repriced. Derek pointed out that validator integration, coupled with a re-staking mechanism like EigenLayer, will shift the income from idle pledge to active verification services. Ether, which was once idle in personal 32 ETH hot wallets, is transforming into remote proof revenue for oracles, bridges and DSPs.

Is Pectra a "fulcrum"? This statement is biased. The panelists agreed that even if the Blob utilization rate is only 40%, the large Roll-up will not turn to Celestia or EigenDA. Ethereum’s Data Availability (DA) remains the most cost-effective trust premium in the crypto space. Continue to expand the basic layer, and the entrusted market will solve the remaining problems on its own.

Derek’s core view is: “It’s not a complete turn, it’s a double-in commitment to speed up Ethereum and ensure Roll-up comfort .”

Qi added: Killer user experience upgrades will still be prototyped on L1 first—as is true for 7702, and PeerDAS sampling will follow this path—and then cascading down to L2.

OKX Ventures View: The synergistic effect between the highly modular Roll-up stack and the continuously expanding L1 capacity curve forms a flywheel that no single chain can match. Pectra is not “save Ethereum”; it just clears the last user experience divide before PeerDAS boosts DA by 25 times. **
**

5. Hot topics: Is Pectra " enough " ?

Roll-up ' s DA Choice : Unanimously no —Arbitrum, Starknet, and EthStorage do not plan to switch to external DAs, even if Blob utilization remains below 60%.

Non-technical leverage : Derek believes that we should continue to pay attention to L1 expansion and Roll-up support ; there is no need to engage in issuance game. Qi means that the L1 extension experiment (block-level access list, larger Gas restrictions) will originate from Ethereum and will be backpropagated to L2 .

6. OKX Ventures ' future investment strategy

Smart account infrastructure will become the default consumer portal. EIP-7702, combined with the third-party payer mechanism, will compress the two-year gap between encrypted native contract design and large-scale user guidance. OKX Ventures prioritizes investment in modular payer liquidity networks , intent relays , and AA risk scoring engines , allowing any Web2 application to provide "stablecoin payment of Gas fees" and "one-click registration" capabilities from day one.

Blob native content is the next blank area. The storage incentive layer that can ensure that the protocol expires is very promising. The cheap blobs, coupled with the storage incentive layer, will create a medium where games, AI models and social media can be built entirely on Ethereum security.

Re-pled will absorb the funds saved by the verifier. EIP-7251 freed up hardware budgets and activated idle Ether. Protocols that can convert these collaterals into measurable security—such as oracle proof , bridge verification , shared sorter collection —will receive excess returns. OKX Ventures expects “investment-grade” re-staking targets to be scarce and is actively funding teams with the clearest risk-adjusted accounting.

PeerDAS is the real turning point . When the sampled DA is landed, Roll-up can dilute the marginal DA cost by 10 times without giving up Ethereum trust. Teams currently building data sampling clients , proof compression circuits or DA markets will master the core tool layer after Fusaka is activated. OKX Ventures is actively looking for tools, proof compression and data availability market projects that can be the first to lay out Fusaka .