Ethereum — the network that unleashed smart contracts on the world — moves on to the next chapter with today’s Pectra upgrade, but what does it really mean?
Pectra is scheduled to go live on Ethereum mainnet at the start of epoch 364032, May 7, 2025, at around 10:00 am UTC. The three main Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) included are EIP-7702, EIP-7251 and EIP-7691.
Ethereum Pectra Consensys announcement. Source: Consensys
EIP-7702 allows externally owned accounts to act as smart contracts and cover gas expenses (transaction fees) and payments in tokens that are not Ether (ETH). EIP-7251 increases the validator staking limit from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, which makes operations for large stakers easier and simpler.
Lastly, EIP-7691 increases the number of data blobs per block, which allows for better layer-2 scalability and potentially significantly reduces transaction fees. Sergej Kunz, co-founder of Ethereum decentralized