According to a report by CoinDesk, Ethereum developers did not finalize the timeline for the mainnet Pectra upgrade during the All Core Developers meeting held on Thursday. This decision was made due to errors encountered during the operation of the upgrade on two testnets, prompting developers to conduct additional tests to ensure a smooth deployment.
The issues faced by Pectra on Holesky and Sepolia (two of Ethereum’s main testnets) were attributed to misconfigurations in the testing environment rather than problems with Pectra itself. Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes stated during the meeting, “We seem to need more information in order to really determine a specific launch date.” Previously, developers had anticipated the mainnet upgrade would occur in April of this year.
Developers decided to create a “shadow fork” of the Holesky testnet, which had been unable to function properly since the last Pectra test, as configuration issues forced many validators offline, resulting in the network’s inability to accurately record transactions.
Stokes mentioned that once Holesky can successfully complete final confirmations again—meaning it can add and record transactions as usual—there will be more data to determine the next steps for Pectra’s mainnet launch. Developers indicated that Holesky is expected to resume normal operation around March 28.
Improvements of Pectra
The name of the “Pectra” upgrade combines the execution layer’s “Prague” upgrade and the consensus layer’s “Electra” upgrade, aimed at enhancing the experience for users and network operators. One of the key improvement proposals is EIP-7702, which will endow cryptocurrency wallets with certain smart contract functionalities. The purpose of this change is to further advance Ethereum towards account abstraction, a technology that allows wallet developers to introduce user-friendly features, such as paying fees with tokens other than Ether (ETH).
Another critical proposal, EIP-7251, will alleviate some concerns for Ethereum validators. This change will increase the maximum staking amount for individual validators from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, meaning that those wishing to stake more than 32 ETH will no longer need to spread their assets across so many nodes, enhancing convenience for validators and reducing the startup time for new nodes.
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