On January 16, 2025, Ethereum developer held the 203rd All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) meeting with the main focus on upgrading Pectra.
During the meeting, ETH developers finalized the upgrade rollout schedule after months of active debate. Christine Kim, an executive at Galaxy Research, shared a summary of the meeting with the community.
Ethereum Pectra Upgrade: When Will It Launch?
Ethereum developers agreed to launch the Pectra upgrade in early to mid-March 2025. They also agreed to a new schedule, including the next ACDE call scheduled for January 20 or 30, 2025.
At the meeting, the block number for the upgrade and the exact date and time will be agreed upon.
The developers must decide on the release of the new client for the Pectra upgrade by February 3. The Sepolia fork is scheduled for February 12, followed by Holesky seven days later. As mentioned, the mainnet fork will take place in early to mid-March, but this is subject to any unforeseen obstacles disrupting the plan.
As Christine Kim highlighted, Ethereum developers are not planning to launch a new devnet for this upgrade. Therefore, they are taking the approach of shadow forking the Sepolia and/or Holesky testnets.
It is worth noting that the developers launched the Mekong testnet last year for the Pectra upgrade.
Overall, she mentioned that bugs in the code could significantly shift the launch schedule. However, she asserted that the chances of a March launch remain high after today’s meeting.
What’s Special About the Pectra Upgrade?
It is important to note that this Pectra upgrade is the biggest since the Dencun Upgrade that lowered fees on Layer-2 protocols. The Pectra upgrade complements those upgrades with a focus on scalability and security.
Once launched, Pectra will introduce innovative features that optimize transaction speeds.
With new features like account abstraction and the EVM Object Format (EOF) enhancement in EIP-7692, this upgrade will benefit both users and developers.
After Pectra, Coingape’s page highlights that the Fusaka upgrade will be the next focus for ETH developers. However, the rollout timeline for this upgrade is still unclear at this time.
Supporting the Ethereum L2 Ecosystem
A series of ongoing upgrades in the Ethereum ecosystem are designed to improve Layer-2 (L2) scalability solutions.
L2 protocols in particular have welcomed more innovation than the Ethereum blockchain, so they may be the biggest beneficiaries of these upgrades.
As previously reported, Tether has launched USDT0, its new stablecoin on Ink, an L2 solution launched by Kraken. This next wave of innovation will likely benefit even more from the developer experience improvements that Pectra and Fusaka will introduce in the coming months.
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