What is Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade?
The upcoming Ethereum Pectra upgrade, scheduled for early 2025, represents a major milestone in Ethereum’s development, focusing on improving usability, scalability, and efficiency. Split into two phases to mitigate risks, the upgrade combines enhancements to the execution layer (Prague) and the consensus layer (Electra). Key features include advanced account abstraction, enabling users to pay gas fees with ERC-20 tokens, flexible staking by raising the validator balance cap from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, and critical technical improvements such as Verkle trees and Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS). These innovations aim to streamline Layer 2 rollups, reduce transaction costs, and bolster network scalability, addressing long-standing challenges while enhancing Ethereum’s role as a decentralized platform for developers and users alike.
