Ethereum completes Pectra upgrade, enabling 'smart account' wallet functionality and staking flexibility

Key Takeaways

• Ethereum's Pectra upgrade marks a significant technical evolution, enabling features like increased staking limit and account abstraction.
• The upgrade facilitates gas fee subsidies and enhances smart contract deployment and multi-chain app development through several new EIPs.

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Ethereum has completed its long-awaited Pectra upgrade on the mainnet, its largest upgrade since the Merge and Dencun.

The upgrade, which kicked in at epoch 364032, just after 6:00 a.m. ET on May 7, introduces a powerful suite of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) designed to advance staking efficiency, wallet usability, and layer 2 scalability, while laying critical groundwork for Ethereum’s long-term scaling roadmap.

Pectra was deployed smoothly after months of rigorous testing. Following earlier technical issues that prevented transaction confirmations on the Holesky and Sepolia testnets, by the end of March, Ethereum developers successfully activated Pectra on the newly created Hoodi testnet, setting the stage for a stable mainnet launch and restoring confidence in the upgrade’s readiness.

11 EIPs targeting network bottlenecks

Pectra consolidates 11 key EIPs, including EIP-7251, EIP-7702, EIP-7002, and EIP-7691, among others.

At the consensus layer, EIP-7251 raises the maximum staking cap from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. This change allows large staking services to operate with fewer validators, reducing operational overhead while maintaining decentralization through improved economic incentives.

It also enables validator exits and partial withdrawals to be managed via the execution layer, allowing smart contracts and applications to automate staking lifecycle management on-chain, which is a major step toward programmable and institutional staking.

On the user side, EIP-7702 brings “smart account” functionality to user wallets. Built on the path to account abstraction, it enables users to pay gas fees with tokens other than ETH, batch multiple transactions into one, and use alternative authentication methods like passkeys.

These features are aimed at making Ethereum more user-friendly for both newcomers and developers.

To support more dynamic validator strategies, EIP-7002 allows ETH to be withdrawn directly from the execution layer, removing a longstanding friction point in staking workflows. The enhancement targets greater liquidity and flexibility, especially for services managing pooled or delegated staking.

Pectra also brings improvements to Ethereum’s data availability layer through EIP-7691, which increases the number of data blobs that can be included per block. This may bring benefits to layer 2 rollups by providing more space for transaction data, improving throughput, and reducing costs.

EIP-7691 lays critical groundwork for future upgrades like proto-danksharding and Verkle trees, which are expected to push Ethereum’s scalability further.

Other improvements include EIP-2935, which makes recent block hashes accessible on-chain, enabling trustless oracle services and cross-layer communication, and EIP-6110, which streamlines validator onboarding by moving deposit processing to the execution layer, reducing activation times to under 15 minutes.

There are also EIP-7623, EIP-7685, EIP-7549, and EIP-7840, which focus on improving data efficiency and fee stability, as well as EIP-2537, which targets lower gas costs for cryptographic operations.

What’s next after Pectra?

Pectra is the first phase of a two-part upgrade, with the second phase, Fusaka, scheduled for late 2025. Fusaka is expected to further enhance protocol performance with technologies like PeerDAS, expanding the network’s ability to scale securely and efficiently.

Ethereum’s price showed little reaction after the Pectra upgrade went live. At the time of reporting, the asset was trading around $1,800, up 3% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap .

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