Yesterday, the fork occurred that introduced the Pectra update on Ethereum.
Everything went smoothly, as usual, and now the Ethereum protocol supports the innovations introduced by Pectra.
In particular, among these, the UX features of the Smart Account wallet, the data storage blobs increased by 2 times, and the real-time validator UX improvements are noteworthy.
Summary
Ethereum: Pectra update successfully completed
The Pectra update was applied to the Ethereum mainnet on May 7, 2025, at epoch 364032.
This update follows the previous one, Dencun, from last year, and introduces features to enhance Ethereum accounts, improve the validation experience, support layer-2 scalability, and more.
One of the most important innovations introduced on Ethereum by Pectra are the so-called Smart Accounts added by EIP-7702.
This is an important step forward towards widespread account abstraction, to enable users to enhance their externally owned accounts (EOA) with smart contract functionalities. It is a new hybrid approach that combines the simplicity of EOAs with the programmability of smart contract-based accounts, and allows wallets to support transaction batching, gas sponsorship, alternative authentication, spending controls, and recovery mechanisms.
EIP-7251, on the other hand, improves the user experience of validators by increasing the maximum balance on which a validator can receive rewards from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, and allowing larger operators to consolidate multiple validators by merging them together.
EIP-7002 also extends the capabilities of the validators, introducing withdrawals that can be activated from the execution layer.
EIP-6110, on the other hand, removes a persistent trace of the pre-merge Ethereum, namely the delay between validator deposits and their addition to the deposit queue.
Finally, EIP-7691 doubles the processing capacity of blobs, introduced with the Dencun update.
“`htmlThe scalability of Ethereum
“`By now it is clear that scalability on Ethereum can only be achieved with layer-2s, and the blobs introduced by Dencun have greatly helped to drastically reduce the transaction fee costs on layer-2s.
With Pectra, these costs should be further reduced, and in the future, they will be even more reduced by moving from the current system where each node stores every blob, to one where nodes will store only a subset and sample the network to verify the remaining data of the blob.
In recent years, the success of some Ethereum competitors, primarily Solana, has been due to greater scalability and a consequent strong reduction in fees. With Ethereum, this process only began last year and needs to go through layer-2 to be completed.
The effect on the price of ETH (Ethereum) of the Pectra update
The prezzo di Ethereum responded very well to the news of Pectra’s success.
To tell the truth, it was rather expected that the update would occur successfully, but despite this, all the possible consequences were not yet well known.
Compared to yesterday, today the price of ETH is gaining 6%, while, for example, BTC is stuck below 3%.
In the last 24 hours, Ethereum is the top 15 crypto that has recorded the highest price increase.
However, it should not be forgotten that the current price is still below those $2,000 it had at the end of March, and much lower than the $2,400 at the end of October 2024, before the so-called Trump trade.
Note that the current levels are not only 40% lower than the historical highs of 2021, but they are also in line with those of November 2023.
It should be added, however, that starting from the end of April, the declining phase of early 2025 seems to have ended, and what is happening today seems to strengthen this hypothesis.
