Ethereum Developers Set Pectra Upgrade for Q1 2025

ethereum's anticipated Pectra upgrade is now scheduled to launch in late Q1 2025, according to recent updates from ethereum developers. Pectra is the next major milestone in ethereum's development roadmap, following the Dencun upgrade that was successfully deployed in March.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet” data-width=”500″ data-dnt=”true” wp_automatic_readability=”11.746701846966″>

Some more updated thoughts on the upcoming hard fork after Cancun, Pectra (Prague + Electra):
* Ship Pectra by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
* Include PeerDAS for Rollups at scale.
* Includes EOF to improve the EVM in both L1 and L2.

Longer document inside.
Excited for the conversation to continue. https://t.co/lNwYg0I4vj pic.twitter.com/80dJfALaSv

— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) twitter.com/gakonst/status/1793691798021488935?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow noopener noreferrer”>May 23, 2024

The decision comes after ethereum developers evaluated multiple timeline scenarios. The team opted against a rushed launch ahead of Devcon in November 2024, favoring a more cautious approach that allows for the inclusion of additional, user-impacting features.

“We are seeing this happen with Cancun as well, so realistically my vote would be to try to ship Prague in the first quarter of 2025. At the current scope, delaying Prague appears to have a marginal impact on users and allows us to consider expanding the scope to include more impactful features for users,” ethereum developers noted in a document.

Devcon is the largest developer summit in the Asia Pacific region. This year, the event will be held in Bangkok, Thailand, from November 12 to 15, and aims to bring together developers, technology leaders and development tools companies to learn, discuss and debate the key opportunities and challenges in the developer ecosystem.

Avoiding releasing the Pectra update before or during Devcon will allow the developer team to effectively monitor the execution of Pectra.

During the deployment of Dencun on the Goerli testnet in January, ethereum developers encountered difficulties in achieving consensus within the planned timeframe. The issue was then resolved, allowing the Goerli testnet to finally reach consensus.

In addition to the update schedule, the focus is on improvements to the consensus layer scope and execution layer scope. The developers intend to integrate PeerDAS into Pectra to improve ethereum's data availability capability ahead of the Osaka upgrade, as noted in the document.

ethereum's Osaka upgrade is a future hard fork that is expected to include features that were previously considered for the Pectra upgrade but were postponed. Specifically, the Osaka upgrade is likely to include the implementation of Verkle Tree, a new data structure designed to improve the scalability and decentralization of ethereum.

The developers also considered including EOF to improve smart contract security and developer experience, as well as other improvements such as replacing EIP-3074 with EIP-7702 for better account abstraction compatibility and patching EIP-2935.

“We need to decide on EIP7702 in ACDE and, if so, implement it as a replacement for EIP-3074. “We think it makes sense to do so as it is a more native ML compatible solution due to the new transaction type vs. an opcode,” the ethereum developers wrote.

EIP-7702 is a new transaction type proposed by a group of prominent ethereum developers, including Vitalik Buterin, earlier this month. The proposal is expected to provide similar benefits to EIP-3074 while addressing its potential risks.