Ethereum's Pectra Goes Live

Ethereum has completed its biggest network overhaul since the 2022 Merge. The long-anticipated Pectra upgrade went live on May 7, 2025. Pectra merges two coordinated upgrades into one event: 

1. Prague upgrade on the execution layer .

2. Electra upgrade on the consensus layer. 

Together, they introduce 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), making this the most feature-rich upgrade in Ethereum’s history.

Originally targeted for late 2024, Pectra faced multiple delays due to critical bugs in early testnet deployments. Developers had to launch a third testnet to fully resolve the issues, pushing the mainnet launch well into 2025. 

Staking Gets an Institutional-Grade Overhaul

Two of Pectra’s cornerstone proposals are EIP-7251 and EIP-7002.

• EIP-7251 increases the maximum effective balance for validators from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. This change allows institutional validators to consolidate operations, reduces validator bloat, and improves the efficiency of block finality.

• EIP-7002 complements this by enabling validator exits via the execution layer, rather than requiring consensus-side logic. This brings programmability to validator management and paves the way for advanced staking workflows managed by smart contracts.

Together, these changes make Ethereum staking more scalable, flexible, and suitable for large-scale operators without disadvantaging smaller participants.

Wallet UX Enters a New Era with EIP-7702

EIP-7702 introduces one of the most user-facing innovations to date. It allows externally owned accounts (EOAs) to temporarily behave like smart contract accounts during a transaction. This opens up features like transaction batching, gas sponsorship, and wallet delegation without requiring users to migrate to full smart contract wallets.

Unlike the earlier account abstraction proposal EIP-4337, which required external infrastructure, EIP-7702 is natively embedded into the Ethereum protocol. This lowers the barrier to adoption and brings smart account functionality to mainstream wallets like MetaMask. With EIP-7702, the wallet becomes a programmable platform, dramatically enhancing the user experience across dApps and DeFi protocols.

Scaling Rollups with Blob Capacity and Calldata Reform

Pectra also delivers major improvements to Ethereum’s rollup-centric scaling strategy. EIP-7691 increases the target number of data blobs per block from 3 to 6 and the maximum from 6 to 9. 

In Ethereum, data blobs are large, temporary data chunks added to transactions to help Layer 2 rollups store and verify data more efficiently, without being directly accessible by smart contracts.

This immediately expands the available bandwidth for Layer 2 solutions to publish transaction data, lowering fees and improving finality.

To reinforce this shift, EIP-7623 raises the gas cost of calldata from 16 to 42 gas per byte. This incentivizes rollups to move away from calldata and fully adopt blob-based data availability, which is both cheaper and more efficient.

With further upgrades like Fusaka on the horizon, blob capacity is expected to increase by over 10 times in the coming year.

Core Protocol Enhancements: Under-the-Hood Improvements

In addition to headline-grabbing EIPs, Pectra incorporates several low-level improvements that bolster Ethereum’s technical foundation. These include:

• EIP-6110: Streamlines validator onboarding by moving deposit logic into the execution layer

• EIP-7685: Standardizes execution-to-consensus layer communication for future upgrade flexibility

• EIP-7549: Optimizes consensus data structures by removing redundant attestation data

• EIP-7840: Adds blob scheduling to configuration files for better cross-client coordination

• EIP-2935: Extends the historical availability of block hashes for smarter contracts and better on-chain randomness

• EIP-2537: Introduces a native precompile for BLS signature verification, reducing gas costs for cryptographic operations and enabling more scalable staking and cross-chain bridges

While these updates are largely invisible to end users, they are essential for Ethereum’s long-term scalability and protocol stability.

What Comes Next: The Road to Fusaka and Beyond

Pectra is only one milestone in Ethereum’s six-phase roadmap, which includes The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. 

With The Surge currently underway, the next major protocol upgrade, Fusaka, is expected to introduce full danksharding, increasing blob capacity to up to 56 per block. 

Ethereum continues to evolve from a general-purpose smart contract platform into a fully-fledged financial and computational backbone for the decentralized world.