Core developer Tim Beiko confirms key testnet milestones ahead of Ethereum’s next major upgrade.
Ethereum Moves Closer to Pectra Deployment
Tim Beiko announced testnet fork dates for Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, with Holesky forking on Feb. 24 and Sepolia on March 5. The mainnet timeline will be determined after the March 6 developer call.
Pectra is going live 🥳 Holesky will fork at slot 3710976 (Mon, Feb 24 at 21:55:12 UTC) Sepolia will fork at slot 7118848 (Wed, Mar 5 at 07:29:36 UTC) Assuming Sepolia goes smoothly, we’ll pick the mainnet slot on the March 6 ACD call 📅
What Pectra Brings to Ethereum
Pectra merges the Prague and Electra upgrades, introducing blob spaces for cheaper transactions, PeerDAS for L2 scalability, and Verkle Trees for optimized data handling.
Pectra, expected in March, will increase the blob target from 3 to 6, doubling the capacity of L2s. IMO we should make the blob target also staker-voted, so that it can increase in respose to technology improvements without waiting for hard forks.
Staking and Gas Fee Innovations
The upgrade raises the maximum ETH stake from 32 to 2,048, improving staking rewards. Account Abstraction will also allow users to pay gas fees with stablecoins like USDC or DAI.
Roadmap: 2025 and Beyond
Phase one in 2025 will enhance user experience and validator efficiency, while the second phase in 2026 will focus on deep technical improvements, including the Ethereum Virtual Machine Object Format (EOF).
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