Ethereum Pectra Upgrade: 3 Key Takeaways From Latest Dev Call

Following the conclusion of the 206th All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) calls, which happened on February 27, new updates on Ethereum Pectra have been released.

Galaxy researcher Christine Kim took to X to share three crucial takeaways on the upgrade, which combines Prague and Electra updates.

Three Takeaways From Ethereum’s #206 ACDE Call

After going live on the Holesky testnet on February 24, 2025, Pectra is billed to go on the Sepolia testnet by March 5, on epoch 222464.

The successful upgrade of both testnets will usher in a mainnet activation epoch.

This decision came after Pectra Upgrade failed to settle on the Holesky testnet.

Though rare, developers had been working on mitigation routes for Holesky.

In effect, Kim acknowledged that no changes have been made to the scheduled date for the Sepolia fork.

The Ethereum devs are still moving forward with the upgrade by next Wednesday.

Source: X

Concerning this plan, updates on four clients, geth, besu, nethermind, and Lodestar will be released in the coming days.

Next, Kim pointed to the fact that the developers have not given up on Holesky as they are still investing efforts and resources into the recovery of the network.

A meeting has been scheduled to discuss and coordinate how slashing protections across all holesky validators will be disabled.

No matter the decisions made, Holesky will still take a few weeks before it fully recovers, according to the Galaxy researcher.

One of the inconveniences triggered by Holesky’s failure is the loss of specific testing capabilities. Hence, Ethereum developers are working on delivering a path for testing akin to Holesky.

They are also trying to prevent a recurrence of what happened to Holesky with the introduction of long-term mitigation and recovery tools.

Ethereum Pectra and its Relevance

The Pectra upgrade is a follow-up from last year’s Dencun upgrade. Coming with this upgrade are features that are capable of augmenting Ethereum accounts.

They could improve the validator experience and support Layer-2 scaling, amongst many other operations. Noteworthy, Pectra is buffered by several Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

This includes EIP-3074, which adds an innovative “social recovery” function. This could eliminate the problem of lost private keys for all Ethereum users.

More precisely, the EIP-3074 could unlock the big potential of simple ether wallets, which are commonly known as Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs).

It would achieve this feat by granting them a broad spectrum of smart contract abilities.

With this EIP-3074 and others, the Pectra upgrade will achieve its focus of optimizing both the execution and consensus layers of Ethereum.

Future Expectations

Generally, the broader Ethereum ecosystem has seen some troubling times recently, especially after Bybit was hit with a $1.4 billion attack.

Bad actors targeted the cryptocurrency exchange via SAFE servers, according to a recent update from the investigation into the matter. This led to the transfer of $1.4 billion in ETH.

Bybit moved from holding 443,691 ETH in its reserve before the hack to having 39,692 ETH within an hour.

However, there has been some improvement since Bybit closed the hack-made gap in the Ethereum reserve.

The recovery was achieved through multiple loans such as asset purchases, loans, and whale deposits, all amounting to 446,870 ETH.

However, the trading platform has confirmed the return of some of its loans, including 40,000 ETH to Bitget exchange.

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