During the “Consensus Layer Call 142” yesterday, the major developers of the Ethereum blockchain decided to split the upcoming Pectra update into two phases.
The implementation of the code change, already extensively discussed over more than 4 years of work, indeed requires an excessively large amount of work to complete everything in a single session.
In this article, we revisit the main topics of Pectra and delve into the timing of the update.
All the details below.
Pectra Update: big news coming for the Ethereum blockchain
From 2020 to today, the core developers of the Ethereum blockchain have done an enormous job fixing all the changes planned with the Pectra update.
Now while Vitalik Buterin and his team discuss the latest refinements, we are approaching the phase of actual implementation.
It is expected that the Pectra update will soon introduce a series of features that will greatly enhance the end-user experience.
First and foremost, after the discussions of the EIP-3074, it was agreed that the update would introduce the possibility of delegating smart contracts directly from Ethereum wallets.
This innovation opens the doors to multiple on-chain payments and gas transactions with ERC-20 tokens other than ETH.
To this is added the complete transition to the function of “account abstraction” which allows the user to recover the private keys of a wallet through social recovery means. The funds are therefore separated from the keys of each account.
1/ Big changes are coming to the Ethereum ecosystem.
The EIP-3074 upgrade was recently approved in the next Hardfork, dubbed 'Pectra' or 'Petra'. pic.twitter.com/tQWn7372bP
— Pluid (@tryPluid) April 16, 2024
It should also be emphasized how Pectra will have a decisive impact also in the logic of the consensus of the Ethereum blockchain.
The update plans to increase the limits for deposits in Proof-of-Stake by a whopping 64 times, going from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH.
This means that a single whale will be able to do staking through a single address without having to create multiple wallets of 32 ETH. This detail is very useful because it lightens the workload of Ethereum and makes it more efficient.
Large providers like Lido and Coinbase would have a tangible advantage in this regard.
Finally, with Pectra it is expected to implement new methods to allow the chain to store large amounts of data.
One of these is the “verkle tree”, a new system that allows to lower the gas cost on L1 by introducing zk proofs within the mainnet.
The same Vitalik Buterin has repeatedly reminded of his intention to make blockchain transactions increasingly “ZK-snark friendly”.
Pectra will be divided into two stages: here are the timelines
Given the massive planned interventions, the developers of the Ethereum blockchain have chosen to split the Pectra update into two phases.
During the “Consensus Layer Call 142” held yesterday, the core developers of the team discussed the infeasibility of completing all implementations in one go.
In fact, such a heavy amount of changes to the code could lead to bugs and cyber attacks, even while performing a test preliminary of the update.
By dividing Pectra into two stages, the workers will be able to focus on one software modification at a time, minimizing the risk of errors as much as possible.
In the middle of the call, there was also talk about the timing with which these two rounds of updates should see the light.
Although not specifying precise dates, the developers have scheduled the first intervention on the blockchain at the beginning of 2025. In this phase, eight improvement proposals will be included, among which the EIP-7702 aimed at improving the user experience in the use of wallets.
PECTRA 1:
EL changes include EIP 2537, 2935, 7685, 7702
CL changes include EIP 6110, 7002, 7251, 7549
More description about each of these in the attached tables: pic.twitter.com/eGkIGoULhh
— Christine Kim (@christine_dkim) September 13, 2024
The second update package instead includes proposals aimed at making changes to the Ethereum virtual machine. We are talking about the implementation of EOF and the PeerDAS function which improves the sampling of data availability, offering advantages to L2 networks.
In any case, for the second phase of Pectra a precise framework has not been outlined as in the first, and no time reference has been given.
The developers have recognized that the purposes of these updates can change over time, so consolidating this update would not be wise at this time.
Alex Stokes, dell’Ethereum Foundation, è intervenuto dopo la riunione degli sviluppatori affermando pubblicamente che:
“It seems that there are agreements to divide the current Pectra in some way. And then downstream, we can understand what will come next.”
The progress of Ethereum after the latest network updates
Pectra, just like all the other updates completed in the past, radically modify the code of the Ethereum blockchain introducing improvements and sometimes even new limits.
In general, all changes to the original code are designed to make the Ethereum environment more performant, secure, and scalable.
Sometimes, however, although the majority of these have improved the ecosystem, they can also fail in their short-term objectives.
An example of this is the famous update “Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain” discussed in EIP-1559, which then went live in September 2023.
This implementation was designed to increase the intrinsic value of Ethereum, creating a premise to offset the issuance of the ETH currency.
From that moment on, every transaction carried out on the blockchain would burn a small amount of ETH.
The goal was to make the cryptocurrency in the network a deflationary currency, with more burn rather than mint.
A distance of a year, we can clearly see how at the moment, the issuance is stably above 0. This testifies how the EIP-1559 update has not produced the effects hoped for by the community. This does not mean, however, that the update is not a good thing in itself for Ethereum, but that it simply has not been a “game-changer”.
A more recent aggiornamento, namely Dencun, has instead fully replicated the wishes expressed by the developers and the community.
This update, successfully completed in mid-March, aimed to reduce the cost of Ethereum layer-2 transactions.
Through the invention of the blob, the developers of the blockchain thought they could significantly reduce the computational load of scaling solutions.
After a few months, we can indeed confirm that the update has had a positive outcome: the major L2s have reduced the fee load by at least 96%.
Even the Base network has seen a cost reduction of 99.4%.
