Ethereum activated its long -awaited “Pecctra” upgrade on Wednesday, marking the most important overhaul of the blockchain since the merger in 2022.
The update aims to rationalize stimulation, improve portfolio features and improve global efficiency. It then happens that Ethereum is faced with growing competition and internal debates on its management.
Pectra upgrade, a “hard fork” in the language of the blockchain, was triggered at 10:05 am UTC and finalized about 13 minutes later.
A key element of the upgrade is to increase the amount of eTh that can be put from 32 to 2,048. This change could help accelerate and rationalize operations for stakers, the large network of companies and individuals who help keep the Ethereum -free Ethereum network.
Previously, scaling required to configure several validators; Now stakers can consolidate this amount under one knot.
The upgrade, considered to be the largest in Ethereum since the merger of 2022 to proof of assistance, arrives at a delicate moment for the ecosystem. He follows two failed trials, one of which has permanently put a key Ethereum test network.
In addition, Ethereum, the network that has introduced smart contracts and decentralized blockchain applications, has regularly lost market share for more agile competitors in recent months.
Solana, in particular, has attracted more new developers in the past year than Ethereum, which has long been considered the dominant non -bitcoin blockchain.
The Ethereum community has debated the question of whether its unofficial leader – the non -profit Ethereum Foundation – is to be blamed for the late ETH token price and the perception of industry whose network has no coherent vision.
In response, the Swiss Foundation introduced a new leadership and a new set of plans to invigorate the community of the developers of the chain.
Relief for suppliers of jealking
The EIP-7251 is at the center of the upgrade, which increases the maximum quantity that validators can accumulate from 32 to 2,048 ETH.
The change is intended to help the development institutions and infrastructure providers by meeting the needs of the validators who spring the ETH to maintain the operational channel. If you want to invest more than 32 ETH with the network, you must divide your participation among dozens – or sometimes hundreds – of separate nodes.
This consumes not only time and leads to costs, but it has also resulted in lines of several weeks so that new nodes join the network.
By increasing the ignition limit, “this means that small operators can directly aggravate their participation, while large can consolidate validators to reduce the use of the bandwidth on the P2P network,” wrote Tim Beiko, the lead to the protocol to the Ethereum Foundation, on X.
Account abstraction
Another central component of the hard fork, EIP-7702, would allow cryptographic wallets to temporarily operate as intelligent contracts. This change brings the Ethereum network closer to the abstraction of the accounts, a series of features which open the way to more friendly cryptographic portfolios.
Users could, for example, pay transaction fees in Stablecoins instead of ETH, configure an automatic payment system or introduce recovery access to wallets if they forget their seed sentences.
What is in Pectra?
While EIP-7251 and EIP-7702 are the main objectives of Pectra, nine other Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPS) have been part of the packaging, mainly affecting the suppliers of jealization, validators and developers:
- EIP-2537: introduces a network function which makes certain cryptographic operations more quickly and more effective, which could benefit from confidentiality tools.
- EIP-2935: stores more blocking information on the blockchain, which facilitates the verification of this data.
- EIP-6110: Makes the process to make new validators join less complexes by managing their more directly in the system.
- EIP-7002: allows validators to directly initiate the withdrawals of their funds, improving security and user experience for the development services.
- EIP-7549: optimizes how the blockchain deals with the validator vote.
- EIP-7623: Increase the costs of Calldata, which is used for data availability (DA).
- EIP-7685: Establish a standardized means of communicating requests between the execution layer and the consensus layer.
- EIP-7691: Increases the blockchain’s ability to manage more data blobs per block.
- EIP-7840: introduces a configurable parameter to manage the amount of data that Ethereum can manage by block.
Read more: Ethereum is preparing the biggest code change since the upgrading of merger with Pectra
Update (10:22 UTC): Updates to indicate that Pectra upgrade has finalized.
