Liquid Collective and Obol report that Ethereum’s planned Pectra upgrade in early 2025 has multiple risks, including key issues related to client, operating node and cloud diversity.
Pectra upgrade overview
The Pectra upgrade will merge the Prague and Electra upgrades and make important changes to Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers. Expected to go live in the first quarter of 2025, this upgrade will include Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-7251. The proposal aims to consolidate staking by increasing the maximum effective balance to 2048 ETH, thereby reducing the number of validators required and reducing pressure on the Ethereum communication layer.
Client and operating node risks
The report focuses on risks associated with consensus and execution clients. It warned that a major vulnerability in the main client could lead to severe penalties and network instability. Since staking is the foundation of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism, relying on a single node operator may expose staked assets to the risk of downtime and penalties. The report highlights the importance of node operator diversity to maintain health and prevent single points of failure.
Cloud diversity issues
The report also highlights the need for geographic diversity among validators and cloud providers. It cited recent outages at major providers such as Hetzner and AWS as illustrating the importance of diversity in the cloud. Decentralized Validator Technology (DVT) is highlighted as a key strategy to enhance validator resiliency and reduce associated risks. This is also considered key to institutional adoption.
In fact, the above issues have been discussed in the Ethereum community for a long time, Vitalik
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This article reports: What are the main risks of the Ethereum Pectra upgrade? First appeared in Chain News ABMedia.
