According to a report from CoinDesk, Ethereum developers did not finalize the timeline for the mainnet Pectra upgrade during the All Core Developers meeting held on Thursday. The reason for this is that the largest upgrade since 2024 has encountered errors during its operation on two testnets, prompting developers to conduct additional testing to ensure a smooth deployment of the upgrade.
The issues faced by Pectra on Holesky and Sepolia, two of Ethereum’s main testnets, were caused by misconfigurations in the testing environment rather than problems with Pectra itself. Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes stated during the meeting, “We seem to need more information to truly determine a specific launch date.” Previously, developers had anticipated upgrading the mainnet in April of this year.
Developers decided to create a “shadow fork” of the Holesky testnet, which has been unable to operate normally since the last Pectra test due to configuration issues that forced many validators offline, meaning the network cannot accurately record transactions.
Stokes indicated that once Holesky can successfully complete final confirmations again—meaning it can add and record transactions as usual—there will be more data available to decide the next steps for Pectra’s mainnet launch. Developers mentioned that Holesky is expected to resume normal operations around March 28.
Improvements of Pectra
The name of the “Pectra” upgrade combines the execution layer upgrade “Prague” and the consensus layer upgrade “Electra,” aiming to enhance the experience for users and network operators. One of the main improvement proposals is EIP-7702, which will endow cryptocurrency wallets with certain smart contract functionalities. The purpose of this change is to further advance Ethereum towards account abstraction, a technology that allows wallet developers to add user-friendly features, such as using tokens other than Ether (ETH) to pay transaction fees.
Another key proposal, EIP-7251, aims to alleviate some of the burdens faced by Ethereum validators. This change will increase the maximum staking amount for an individual validator from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, meaning that those who wish to stake more than 32 ETH will no longer need to spread their assets across so many nodes, enhancing the convenience for validators and reducing the startup time for new nodes.
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