PANews reported on May 7 that according to The Block, the Ethereum mainnet successfully activated the Pectra upgrade at 6:05 EST, which is the most important network update after the 2022 merger (The Merge). This hard fork includes 11 EIP improvement proposals, focusing on three major directions: improving staking efficiency, optimizing user experience, and enhancing Layer2 scalability. The successful deployment of the test network Hoodi in March laid the foundation for this upgrade. Pectra lays the foundation for the Fusaka upgrade, which will introduce key technologies such as Verkle Trees and PeerDAS.
The most eye-catching of the upgrade is the EIP-7702 account abstraction scheme, which allows ordinary wallets to temporarily execute smart contract functions. In the future, users can realize innovative experiences such as third-party payment of gas fees, batch packaging transactions, and even restore lost private keys through social contacts. In terms of the staking mechanism, the ETH staking limit of a single verification node has been greatly increased from 32 to 2048, and institutional pledgers can reduce the complexity of operation and maintenance through node mergers. For Layer2 expansion, the Blob data capacity of each block has doubled to 6 (peak 9), and the proto-danksharding technology based on the Dencun upgrade last year has continued to deepen, which is expected to reduce the transaction cost of Rollup chains such as Arbitrum by more than 90%. The technical team has also solved several long-term pain points: the activation time of the verification node has been shortened from 12 hours to 13 minutes, the execution layer can directly control the node exit to improve the security of the key, and the on-chain storage of historical block hash data has enhanced the reliability of the decentralized oracle.
