Ethereum Developers Consider Splitting Pectra Upgrade, Eyeing February Target

Ethereum developers are considering splitting the anticipated Pectra upgrade, which will increase the network’s efficiency and scalability, into two parts, with the first phase potentially launching in early 2025.

“There is broad agreement that if we were to split, we would aim to launch Pectra sooner, or as soon as possible, early next year,” the Ethereum developer said at Ethereum’s Implementation Layer conference on September 12.

Developers are aiming for a February deadline

“February is when it feels realistic that Pectra will be split,” another developer said.

“Splitting the fork only makes sense for Q1 deliveries,” developer Danno Ferrin added.

EF researcher Ansgar Dietrichs said it would be frustrating if it wasn’t delivered as soon as possible in a split. “A split that only delivers the first half of the year, around June, would probably be a failure,” he told the conference.

There has been some speculation that splitting the upgrade into two might be a safer option, as smaller forks are generally less risky.

Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade is a combination of two separate upgrades: the Prague upgrade and the Electra upgrade. The Prague upgrade focuses on changes to the network’s execution layer, while the Electra upgrade affects the consensus layer.

“The complexity of the current Pectra fork and the desire to add more to the upgrade make a split likely,” says Galaxy cryptocurrency researcher Christine Kim.

Kim added that “the scope of the Pectra upgrade could change significantly if the developers decide to split it into two hard forks.”

Developers will decide on this at the next Ethereum All Core Developers (ACD) call on September 19th.

Industry Optimistic About Pectra Upgrade

Kim said on June 7 that the Pectra upgrade would be “probably the biggest upgrade in Ethereum history.”

Ethereum educator Slaughter echoed similar sentiments, telling his 254,500 followers that “the next Ethereum network upgrade, Pectra, will be the biggest upgrade in Ethereum history.”

relevant: Ethereum Research Team Members Surge 2,100% Since 2019

In April 2024, Cointelegraph reported that Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3074 was approved for inclusion in the next update. The proposal would allow regular cryptocurrency wallets to act like smart contracts.

One of the features of EIP-3074 is to provide standard Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs), common wallets like the MetaMask wallet, and smart contract functionality.

This enables features like transaction bundling, where users only need to sign once, and sponsored transactions, where a wallet can delegate funds to be used by another wallet, similar to the account abstraction introduced in ERC-4337.

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