Ethereum (ETH ($2,701.03)) developers have officially scheduled testing of Pectra, the network’s first major update in the remaining 11 months of the year, with a release date set for April 2025.
The upgrade will offer significant improvements for wallets and validators, as Ethereum faces increasing pressure to remain competitive in the evolving blockchain landscape.
At Ethereum’s biweekly “All Core Developers” meeting, developers confirmed that testing will begin on the Holesky testnet on February 26, followed by a test on the Sepolia testnet on March 5. If these tests are successful, developers will reconvene on March 6 to finalize an official mainnet launch date, currently expected in early April, according to Ethereum Foundation protocol support lead Tim Beiko.
The Pectra update, a combination of two separate updates called Prague and Electra, will introduce eight major Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) aimed at improving usability and staking efficiency.
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One of the most anticipated changes is EIP-7702, which aims to improve Ethereum wallets by supporting account abstraction. This means:
- Users will soon be able to pay gas fees with tokens other than ETH, making transactions more flexible.
- Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs, which include most user-controlled wallets) will gain smart contract functionality, allowing wallet developers to introduce new user-friendly features.
Another critical update, EIP-7251, will increase the maximum stake per validator from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. This change is expected to:
- Facilitate staking by allowing large validators to consolidate node management.
- Reducing congestion in validator activation queues that currently forces new validators to wait weeks before deploying new infrastructure.
*This is not investment advice.
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