Ethereum activated its long -awaited “Pectra” upgrade Wednesday, marking Blockchain’s most significant overhaul since the merger in 2022.

The update aims to streamline efforts, improve the wallet functionality and improve overall efficiency. It arrives as Ethereum claims with increasing competition and internal debates about its direction.

Pectra upgrade, a “hard fork” in blockchain parlance, was triggered at 1 p.m. 10:05 UTC and completed about 13 minutes later.

A key element of the upgrade involves increasing the amount of ETH, which can be spelled from 32 to 2,048. This change can help speed up and streamline operations for stakes, the large network of businesses and individuals that help keep the Ethereum network fluid.

Previously required efforts in scale setup of multiple validators; Now stacking can consolidate up to this amount under a single knot.

The upgrade, considered Ethereum’s largest since the 2022 merger to Proof-of-Stake, comes at a delicate moment for the ecosystem. It follows two failed test runs, one of which puts an important Ethereum Test Network permanently out of service.

In addition, Ethereum, the network that introduced smart contracts and blockchain-based decentralized applications, has steadily lost market share to more quick competitors in recent months.

Solana in particular has attracted more new developers in the last year than Ethereum, which was long considered the dominant non-bitcoin blockchain.

The Ethereum Society has discussed whether its unofficial leader-the non-profit Ethereum Foundation is to blame for the hanging price of the Eth-token network, and the perception of the industry that the network lacks a coherent vision.

In response, the Swiss Foundation introduced new leadership and a new set of plans to revive the chain’s developer community.

Help to poor vendors

The key of the upgrade is EIP-7251, which increases the maximum amount that validators can spell from 32 to 2,048 ETH.

The change is intended to help insert institutions and providers of infrastructures by meeting the needs of validators that sting ETH to keep the chain in operation. If you want to invest more than 32 ETH with the network, divide your share among dozens – or sometimes hundreds – of separate nodes.

This not only spends time and incurs costs, but it has also resulted in week -long lines for new nodes to participate in the network.

By increasing the effort limit, “it means that small operators can mix their efforts directly, while large can consolidate validators to reduce bandwidth use on the P2P network,” wrote Tim Beiko, the protocol support management at the Ethereum Foundation, over X.

Account abstraction

Another core component of hard fork, EIP-7702, would allow crypto-drawing books to temporarily act as smart contracts. This change brings the Ethereum network closer to account abstraction, a number of features that pave the way for more user-friendly crypto drawing books.

For example, users could pay transaction fees in stableecoins instead of ETH, create an automatic payment system, or introduce recovery access to wallets if they forget their seed phrases.

What else is in Pectra?

While EIP-7251 and EIP-7702 are the main focus of Pectra, nine other Ethereum improvement suggestions (EIPS) have made it the package that most affects poor vendors, validators and developers:

• EIP-2537: Introduces a function to the network that makes certain cryptographic operations faster and more efficient, which can benefit privacy tools.
• EIP-2935: Stores More previous block information about blockchain, making it easier to verify this data.
• EIP-6110: Make the process of new validators to participate in less complex by dealing with their stack deposits more directly within the system.
• EIP-7002: Allows validators to initiate withdrawal of their funds directly and improve the security and user experience for efforts for services.
• EIP-7549: Optimizes how the blockchain processes Validator votes.
• EIP-7623: Increase the cost of calldata used for data availability (then).
• EIP-7685: Establishes a standardized way of communicating requests between the execution layer and the consensus layer.
• EIP-7691: Increases blockchain’s capacity to handle multiple data slats per day. Block.
• EIP-7840: Introduces a configurable setting to control how much DatTermeum can handle per day. Block.

Read more: Ethereum preps for the biggest code change since the merger with Pectra upgrade

Update (10:22 ADC): Updates to state that Pectra upgrade has been completed.