Ethereum Foundation developers anticipate the Pectra upgrade to launch in the mainnet around March 2025.
In a call on Jan. 16, known as Execution Layer Meeting 203, led by Tim Beiko, Protocol Support Lead at the Ethereum (ETH) Foundation, the developers reviewed the progress of the Pectra upgrade, which will be implemented after the Dencun update.
The team confirmed that Pectra Devnet5, a specialized developer testing network created for Ethereum developers to trial the Pectra upgrade, is now live.
What issues will Pectra upgrade solve?
The Pectra upgrade is a paramount step in addressing some of the core issues facing Ethereum, such as scaling issues. Previously, on Mar. 28, the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin himself, pointed to these challenges. Cooling of the network during peak user traffic has caused slow transaction times and a rise in gas fees due to the cap on the capacity of high-volume transactions.
To change this, Pectra would work on improving the efficiency of Ethereum’s consensus layer by creating a smoother transaction validating process and bottleneck mitigation.
Ensuring this would make sure Ethereum remains reliable as the blockchain continues to become rather sophisticated. “High demand is driving up transaction fees that make Ethereum expensive for the average user. The disk space needed to run an Ethereum client is growing at a fast rate”, reads Ethereum’s roadmap, making it a good time to introduce the upgrade.
While the Pectra upgrade, on its own, does not directly affect gas prices, it will lay the groundwork for other more wallet-friendly upgrades to come.
Layer 2 solutions, like Arbitrum (ARB) and Optimism (OP), take transactions off-chain and are already working toward reducing gas fees. Petra will reduce network burden and pressure by promoting efficiency during peak hours.
Further, a major part of the Pectra upgrade is that it introduces accessibility. By guiding hardware requirements for validators, it will be easy for individuals to be part of the team responsible for securing the blockchain. This democratization results in more decentralization, which promotes increased security for the blockchain as a whole.
When will the Pectra upgrade launch?
Assuming that testing phases proceed normally, the Pectra upgrade is currently envisioned for mainnet activation, possibly in March 2025, as per Jan. 9 call.
As reported earlier, the Pectra upgrade was already launched on the Mekong testnet in November 2024, developers plan to finalize a launch timeline as soon as issues left on the Pectra Devnet 5 and public testnets like Sepolia and Holesky get resolved in February 2025.
However, developers have said that delays could occur, though, should any major bugs or other compatibility issues get caught during the public testnet upgrades. For now, the first test at fork is tentatively scheduled for the week of Feb. 12. However, the timing of the second test would depend on the client release schedule, said Beiko.
