Pectra Upgrade: The Largest Technological Innovation in Ethereum's History

The Pectra upgrade will integrate the two independent upgrade plans, Prague and Electra, and is expected to officially launch in the first quarter of 2025. This upgrade may become the largest technological innovation in the history of Ethereum, aimed at comprehensively improving the network's scalability, security, and user experience.

Key Technical Highlights

Account Abstraction Technology Innovation

EIP-7702 inherits and improves upon the core functionality of EIP-3074, allowing ordinary external accounts (EOA) to temporarily gain the capabilities of a smart contract in a single transaction. This improvement will significantly enhance the functionality and flexibility of EOA, enabling it to perform complex operations such as batch processing and intricate transaction instructions.

Main advantages include:

• Simplify the transaction process, reduce costs
• Introduce a fine-grained permission management mechanism
• Supports transaction fee payment, improving user experience.

This technological breakthrough may give rise to a new generation of user-friendly wallets, driving the emergence of more innovative applications.

Optimize data processing efficiency

EIP-7623 proposes to increase calldata costs and reduce block sizes, thereby improving overall Layer 2 performance. The proposal aims to:

• Reassess calldata pricing mechanism
• Optimize block space utilization
• To free up space for blob data

This improvement will significantly reduce the operating costs of Layer 2 solutions, benefiting the development of related projects such as sorters.

introduces data availability sampling

EIP-7594(PeerDAS) introduces data availability sampling ( DAS) technology, aimed at enhancing the network's support capacity for scaling solutions like rollups. Key features include:

• Improve network scalability and efficiency
• Enhance data availability assurance
• Improve the overall resilience of the network

The implementation of PeerDAS will provide better infrastructure support for DeFi applications and pave the way for emerging innovative applications.

Staking Mechanism Optimization

The EIP-7251 proposal aims to increase the validator staking cap from 32 Ether to 2048 Ether. This change is intended to:

• Reduce the risk of network instability
• Simplified Validator Operation
• Improve the security of the network economy

However, there is still disagreement within the community regarding the impact of this proposal, with the main concern being the potential for validator centralization.

Potential Impacts and Opportunities

1. Promote the birth of a new generation of user-friendly wallets and applications.

2. Reduce the operating costs of Layer 2 and DeFi projects

3. Create development opportunities for emerging technology tracks such as the ZK Prover network

4. Further optimize the overall performance and user experience of the Ethereum ecosystem.

The Pectra upgrade represents a significant breakthrough for Ethereum in terms of technological innovation and ecological development, and is expected to bring a new wave of development momentum to the entire blockchain industry.