Ethereum's Pectra Fork: A Giant Leap Towards Scaling and User Experience Enhancement

Ethereum's Pectra Hard Fork: A Step Towards Scaling and Enhancing User Experience

The Ethereum roadmap has been under scrutiny recently, with even prominent figures like Vitalik Buterin and Jesse Pollak calling for more ambitious scaling plans. The community's concerns have led to a flurry of activity, with Buterin proposing a significant acceleration of the roadmap and L2 leaders agreeing on the need for unification.

Ethereum's next upgrade, Pectra, is scheduled for March and promises to address some of the network's scaling issues and introduce new functionality for everyday users. However, the fork has been split into two, with the initial plan of including up to 20 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) now reduced to just a few.

Pectra will temporarily alleviate scaling issues by doubling the number of blobs used for data availability from three to six. Mallesh Pai, the senior director of research at Consensys, notes that this change was not part of the roadmap six months ago but still falls short of meeting the astonishing demand from L2s. The good news is that the Fusaka fork, slated for later in the year or early next year, will include an upgrade called Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS), which is expected to be the most important change for scaling.

PeerDAS is the next evolution of "proto-danksharding" and enables L2s to store data in blobs without competing with L1 transactions for block space. It divides the task of storing and verifying blob data into manageable chunks, similar to how peer-to-peer torrenting software works. Buterin estimates that PeerDAS will increase the blob count immediately by 2x to 4x, growing to 8x or more over time.

Pectra also brings notable improvements beyond doubling the blob count, such as enabling account abstraction for all accounts and changes to the maximum staking limit. Another mooted change, EIP-7623, is still up in the air as to whether it will be included or not.

One of the most significant usability improvements enabled by Pectra is EIP-7702, which allows existing Ethereum accounts to upgrade to smart accounts (also known as "account abstraction") with a single click. This will finally fix the long-detested requirement to sign two transactions