Ethereum developers have finally delivered a timeline for the chain’s next major upgrade, Pectra, which promises to introduce a host of speed and efficiency improvements to the second-largest blockchain. In a developer meeting held virtually on Thursday, the Ethereum core team set the expected release date for the update as March 2025.
Pectra combines eight major upgrades, or “Ethereum Improvement Proposals” (EIPs), into a single package.
Among the most anticipated updates is EIP-7702, which aims to improve the user experience of the wallets. The update, 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 complicated.
Another highly anticipated update, EIP-7251, increases the maximum amount validators can stake from 32 to 2,048 ETH. The change addresses a huge hassle facing validators who stake ETH to keep the chain running today: those who want to stake more than 32 ETH into the network must split their stake across dozens (or sometimes hundreds) of separate nodes. This is not just a burden. It has also led to weeks-long queues to establish new nodes.
Pectra was originally on track to be Ethereum’s largest hard fork to date, and is the first major on-chain upgrade since the 2024 Dencun upgrade. A blockchain hard fork is a particularly major type of software upgrade that , in essence, moves one network to an entirely new chain.
While still important, the upgrades included in Pectra have been scaled back from some previous plans. The developers decided in September that previous plans for Pectra were too ambitious and agreed to split the original package in two.
The developers plan to test Pectra on Ethereum’s Sepolia and Holesky testnets throughout February. If all goes well, the developers will proceed to bring Pectra to the mainnet in early to mid-March.
Read more: Ethereum developers confirm plan to split ‘Pectra’ upgrade into two
