What updates will be made available to Pectra mainnet be activated on May 7?

Source: Denglian Community

The Pectra network upgrade is scheduled to be activated on the Ethereum main network on May 7, 2025, on epoch 364032 (UTC time 10:05:11)!

From EOA to Smart Account

EIP-7702 represents an important step towards broad account abstraction, enabling users to enhance their externally owned accounts ( EOA ) using smart contract capabilities.

This hybrid approach combines the simplicity of EOA and the programmability of contract-based accounts. In practice, it enables the wallet to support:

• Transaction batch processing , in which multiple operations are executed atomically in a single transaction. No longer need to separate transactions for "approval" and "exchange"!

• Gas sponsorship , allowing others to pay for transaction fees. This is especially useful when you want to trade from an account without ETH.

• Alternative authentication , which means that many hardware security modules (HSMs) in today's mobile phones can be used to bold operations that authorize accounts through technologies such as passkeys .

• Spend controls that can limit the number of tokens a particular application can spend, or limit the daily outflow of the wallet, thereby improving security.

• Recovery mechanism , which provides users with different options to protect their assets without having to migrate to a new account.

To use EIP-7702, EOA signs an authorization pointing to a specific delegate address, the code it wants to execute. Once set up, the account will get the functionality of the new code (e.g. batch processing, sponsorship, authentication logic, etc.). Since choosing a delegate target would hand over a large amount of control, EIP-7702 enforces multiple security checks:

• Chain-specific delegates : By default, delegates are only valid on specific chain IDs, preventing the use of the same authorization on different networks.

• nonce bound delegate : Authorization can be bound to the current nonce of the account, and once the nonce increases, it will automatically invalidate.

• Revocability : The owner of an EOA can always create another EIP-7702 authorization to revoke or replace an existing delegate code, preventing permanent locking in the event of a problem.

Blob Scaling .oO

The last major change in Pectra is EIP-7691, which doubles Ethereum’s blob throughput!

Blob is a temporary data store introduced in the Dencun upgrade , and L2 can use it to submit compressed transaction data and proofs to Ethereum L1. Since its launch, they have reduced L1 fees for L2 by 10-100 times, greatly reducing the cost of L2 user transactions.

The Ethereum main network currently supports 3 blobs per block and up to 6 blobs to adapt to high demand periods. With EIP-7691, these numbers will increase to an average of 6 and up to 9.

Unlike CALLDATAs where nodes store indefinitely, Blobs are deleted from the network after 4096 epochs (about 18 days). This limits the amount of disk space they can use. The binding constraint of the blob is bandwidth, because the blob needs to gossip through Ethereum's peer-to-peer network. To offset the bandwidth increase caused by EIP-7691, Pectra also introduced EIP-7623, which limits the worst-case size of blocks.

In order to continue to scale Ethereum's data throughput without correspondingly increasing bandwidth requirements, we must transition from the world where each node stores each blob to a world where nodes store only a subset and sample the network to verify the remaining blob data. The good news is: work is already in progress for supporting this feature! Francesco of the Ethereum Foundation research team outlined this expansion roadmap in his Devcon keynote .

Pectra Activation

The Pectra network upgrade will be activated on the Ethereum main network, starting at the beginning of epoch 364032, which happened at 10:05:11 UTC on May 7, 2025.

It has been activated previously on Hoodi , Holesky and Sepolia test networks.

Consensus layer version

When running the validator, the consensus layer beacon node and the validator client must be updated.

FAQ

As an Ethereum mainnet user or $ETH holder, what do I need to do?

In short, it is not needed.

If you use an exchange, digital wallet, or hardware wallet, you don't need to do anything unless you are informed by the exchange or wallet provider to take other steps.

If you want to watch the upgrade online, you can join the online viewing party !

What do I need to do as a pledge?

For upgrade compatibility, update the node's execution and consensus layer client to the version listed in the table above. Make sure your beacon node and validator client are updated.

Why "Pectra"?

The upgrade of the execution layer follows the Devcon city name, while the upgrade of the consensus layer uses the stellar name. "Pectra" is a combination of Prague and Electra, a blue-white superstar in the constellation of the Taurus, the venue of Devcon IV.