Ethereum’s developers have finally provided a timeline for the chain’s next major upgrade, Pectra, which promises to introduce a number of speed and efficiency improvements to the second largest blockchain. At a developer meeting held virtually on Thursday, Ethereum’s core team set the upgrade’s target release date for March 2025.
Pectra combines eight major upgrades or “Ethereum Improvement Proposals” (EIPs) into one package.
Among the most anticipated upgrades is the EIP-7702, which aims to improve the user experience of wallets. The upgrade, which was reportedly outlined by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in just 22 minutes, allows users’ wallets to be programmed as smart contracts. It’s part of a broader strategy to bring account abstraction to Ethereum — a series of features that make setting up and using wallets much less clunky.
Another highly anticipated upgrade, EIP-7251, increases the maximum amount validators can stake from 32 to 2,048 ETH. The change addresses a massive inconvenience that the validators staking ETH face to keep the chain running today: Those who wish to invest more than 32 ETH with the network must split their effort between dozens – or sometimes hundreds – of separate nodes. This is not only burdensome. It has also resulted in weeks-long lines for setting up new nodes.
Pectra was originally set to be Ethereum’s biggest hard fork to date, and is the first major improvement to the chain since 2024’s Dencun upgrade. A blockchain hard fork is a particularly important form of software upgrade that essentially moves a network over to an entirely new chain.
While still important, the upgrades included with Pectra have been removed from some previous plans. Developers decided in September that previous plans for Pectra were too ambitious, and they agreed to split the original package in two.
Developers plan to test Pectra on Ethereum’s Sepolia and Holesky test networks throughout February. If all goes well, developers will continue to bring Pectra to the mainnet in early or mid-March.
Read more: Ethereum developers confirm plan to split ‘Pectra’ upgrade in two
