We’re just weeks away from Ethereum’s long-anticipated Pectra upgrade, which, among other things, is expected to make the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain more efficient, scalable, and staker-friendly.
The first significant upgrade since last March, Pectra – a portmanteau of Prague and Electra – has no less than 11 EIPs or code changes, the most of any single upgrade since Ethereum’s launch ten years ago. Speaking of which, Ethereum’s set for its tenth anniversary in July.
A Closer Look at Pectra
The Pectra update has been the talk of the Ethereum community for some time now, and with May 7 locked in for its arrival on mainnet, it will arrive two months after originally expected. We have heard that the technical concerns have been resolved, and Pectra has been running smoothly on the Hoodi testnet for weeks at this point.
The upgrade comes at an interesting time for Ethereum, with weekly active wallet addresses now north of 10 million, and over 90% of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) live on its mainnet.
Vitalik Buterin has been vocal about an ambitious plan to scale the Ethereum L1 execution layer, which he claims might result in efficiency improvements of more than 100 times.
Speaking of which, Ethereum’s still far and away the leader in DeFi with over 1,300 protocols on the network for a combined TVL of $46.6 billion – over half of the overall TVL across all chains. Only in the first quarter of this year did Ethereum’s dApp sales bring in more than $1 billion in fees.
As well as dominant protocols like Aave, Lido and EigenLayer, Ethereum is home to innovative projects like Silo, a noncustodial ‘crypto bank’ notable for its risk-isolation design, and Meson which facilitates zero-slippage cross-chain swaps. A preponderance of financial use-cases abound in the Ethereum ecosystem, which includes several L2 scaling solutions, with the network central to the vision of ‘banking the unbanked.’
Top 5 Expectations from Ethereum Pectra Upgrade
Layer-1 scaling isn’t happening in the short term, though, unlike the features unlocked by Pectra. The upgrade is expected to enhance the experience of those staking ether across multiple validators. Let’s have a look at what to expect:
1. Smarter Wallets & Better UX
- EIP-3074 and EIP-7702 aim to bring account abstraction, making Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) behave like smart contracts.
- Enables features like gasless transactions, social recovery, and batched operations.
- Users can enjoy a more intuitive wallet experience, similar to apps like Argent or Safe, but at the protocol level.
2. Validator & Staking Efficiency
- EIP-7251 raises the validator cap from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, reducing the number of validators needed and easing Beacon Chain load.
- EIP-7002 allows validators to initiate exits directly from the execution layer.
- EIP-6110 improves the onboarding of new validators by allowing deposits to be processed on-chain.
Impact: Institutions and staking pools benefit from lower costs, easier exits, and faster staking activation.
3. Lower Fees & Faster Transactions (Layer-2 Focus)
- Increased blob capacity (from 3 to 6 blobs/block) makes L2 rollups cheaper and faster by providing more data space per block.
- PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) helps nodes verify data availability without needing to download everything.
4. Scalability with Verkle Trees
- Verkle trees are a new cryptographic data structure that supports stateless clients—a key milestone in Ethereum’s roadmap.
- Drastically reduces the storage requirements for running a node.
- Helps decentralize the network by allowing more lightweight node operations.
5. Better Developer Environment
- Enhanced programmability and transaction design flexibility due to EIPs like 3074 and 7702.
- Smart contract developers can build more secure, user-friendly dApps with sponsored gas fees and batched actions.
As for wallet functionality, it’s also set for an enhancement with smart contract capabilities, making it simpler to use and recover. Ultimately, this change will allow wallets to execute batch transactions and implement custom validation logic, smoothing out the process of interacting with various decentralized applications (dApps)
To Fusaka and Glamsterdam
Of course, progress doesn’t pull up to take a breather, which is why following the Pectra upgrade, there will be another, Fusaka, later this year, and then Glamsterdam, which is likely sometime in 2026. By that point, Buterin’s vision for a super-modern execution environment powered by RISC-V may have come into clearer focus. Who knows, the death knell might even sound for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), a long-time pillar of DeFi.
For the moment, Ethereum’s power users eagerly anticipate the implementation of Pectra and with it, a reaffirmation of the network’s unique appeal. The countdown is on!
