Following the conclusion of the 206th All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) calls on February 27, there have been new announcements regarding the Ethereum Pectra upgrade. Galaxy researcher Christine Kim shared three significant takeaways from the call about the upgrade, which combines the Prague and Electra updates.
The first key point is that, after launching on the Holesky testnet on February 24, 2025, Pectra is scheduled to go live on the Sepolia testnet by March 5, on epoch 222464. The successful upgrade of both testnets will pave the way for a mainnet activation epoch. This development comes after the Pectra Upgrade failed to settle on the Holesky testnet, prompting developers to explore mitigation routes. Despite the setback, Kim confirmed that there have been no changes to the scheduled date for the Sepolia fork, and the Ethereum developers are still planning to proceed with the upgrade by next Wednesday.
In preparation for this, updates will be released for four clients: geth, besu, nethermind, and Lodestar. Furthermore, developers are not abandoning the Holesky network. They are investing resources to recover the network, and a meeting is planned to discuss disabling slashing protections across all Holesky validators. Nonetheless, the recovery of Holesky is anticipated to take several weeks.
The failure of Holesky has resulted in the loss of some testing capabilities. Ethereum developers are now focused on creating a testing path similar to Holesky, while also implementing long-term mitigation and recovery tools to prevent a recurrence of such failures.
The Pectra upgrade, a follow-up from last year’s Dencun upgrade, introduces features designed to augment Ethereum accounts. These enhancements aim to improve the validator experience and support Layer-2 scaling, amongst many other operations. Notably, Pectra incorporates several Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including EIP-3074, which introduces a “social recovery” function to resolve the issue of lost private keys for all Ethereum users. This function could potentially unleash the full potential of simple ether wallets, otherwise known as Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs), by endowing them with a wide range of smart contract abilities.
The broader Ethereum ecosystem has faced challenges recently, particularly following a $1.4 billion attack on the Bybit cryptocurrency exchange. However, the platform has since managed to close the gap in the Ethereum reserve created by the hack through a combination of asset purchases, loans, and whale deposits, which together totalled 446,870 ETH.
The Ethereum community will undoubtedly be watching closely as the Pectra upgrade unfolds, and whether it can successfully deliver on its promise of optimizing both the execution and consensus layers of Ethereum, while ensuring the robustness and resilience of the network.
