Ethereum developers have finally provided a timeline for the chain’s next big upgrade, Pectra, which promises to introduce a series of speed and efficiency improvements to the second-largest blockchain. In a developer meeting held virtually on Thursday, the Ethereum core team set the upgrade’s target release date for March 2025.
Pectra combines eight major upgrades, or “Ethereum Improvement Proposals” (EIPs), into one package.
Among the most anticipated upgrades is EIP-7702, aimed at improving the user experience of wallets. The upgrade, reportedly outlined by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in just 22 minutes, allows users’ wallets to be programmed like smart contracts. This is part of a broader strategy to bring account abstraction to Ethereum – a series of features that make setting up and using wallets much less complicated.
Another highly anticipated upgrade, EIP-7251, increases the maximum amount validators can stake from 32 to 2,048 ETH. The change addresses a major problem facing validators who stake ETH to keep the chain running today: those wishing to stake more than 32 ETH with the network must spread their stake among dozens – or sometimes hundreds – of distinct nodes. It’s not just tedious. This also resulted in weeks-long queues for new nodes to be created.
Pectra was originally set to become the largest hard fork of Ethereum to date, and it is the first major upgrade to the chain since the Dencun upgrade in 2024. A blockchain hard fork is a particularly important type of software upgrade that, essentially, moves a network to an entirely new chain.
While still important, the upgrades included in Pectra are removed from some earlier plans. The developers decided in September that previous plans for Pectra were too ambitious and agreed to split the initial package in two.
The developers plan to test Pectra on Ethereum’s Sepolia and Holesky testnets throughout February. If all goes well, developers will integrate Pectra onto the mainnet in early to mid-March.
Read more: Ethereum developers confirm plans to split ‘Pectra’ upgrade in two
