Ethereum Pectra Upgrade: Three Major Directions Leading Future Development

Recently, Ethereum successfully completed the Pectra upgrade, which laid a new foundation for the future development of Ethereum in three key areas: Staking, L2 scaling, and account abstraction. Let's take a look at the core highlights of this upgrade.

1. Staking Mechanism Optimization

This upgrade raises the staking limit for a single validator node from 32 Ether to 2048 Ether, and this change brings two important impacts:

1. Improve Staking deposit and withdrawal efficiency

In the past, Ethereum set the single node staking limit at 32 ETH to maintain decentralization. However, this also led to the problem of long queuing times for deposits and withdrawals during peak periods of the network. The new limit will significantly improve the efficiency of capital flow, especially during peak times like bull markets, effectively alleviating queuing pressure.

2. Reserve space for L1 scaling

Currently, Ethereum has over a million validator nodes, with L1's peak performance consistently maintaining around 60 TPS. After increasing the single node staking limit, it is expected that more flexible layered consensus mechanisms will be introduced in the future, such as a combination model of full voting by large nodes + random voting by small nodes. This may slightly lower the security threshold while significantly enhancing on-chain performance.

3. Benefits of LST Protocol

The upgrades introduced by EIP-6110 and EIP-7002 provide underlying mechanism support for the LST protocol. These changes allow certain aspects that originally relied on centralized components and manual processes to achieve a higher degree of decentralization and automation.

2. L2 Optimization: Blob Expansion Reduces Costs

The implementation of EIP-7742 and EIP-7691 will directly double the Blob capacity and support dynamic adjustments. As the core area for L2 data storage and backup, Blobs are directly related to the cost structure of L2. After this upgrade, L2 fees will further decrease, moving from "very cheap" to "extremely cheap," which is a significant benefit for the L2 ecosystem.

This may lead to a further slowdown in the burning rate of Ether. However, from the perspective of the overall ecological health, the activity of L2 combined with low costs has a longer-term strategic value.

3. Account abstraction takes a key step forward

The introduction of EIP-7702 opens a new chapter for Ethereum account abstraction, significantly enhancing the flexibility of wallets and user experience:

• Supports batch transactions for more efficient operations.
• Allow the use of any token to pay for Gas, lowering the entry barrier.
• Introduce mechanisms such as social recovery to enhance account security and usability.

In the future, account abstraction wallets based on EIP-7702 will become smarter and more convenient. New users can even register and use wallets directly through their phone numbers, without worrying about the complexities of address management and Gas preloading, which is expected to fundamentally improve the user experience of Ethereum.

Summary

The Pectra upgrade is not just a routine feature iteration; it paints a clearer development path for Ethereum's future in key areas such as Staking mechanism optimization, L2 scaling, and account abstraction. This upgrade will bring more possibilities to the Ethereum ecosystem and promote the entire network towards a more efficient and user-friendly direction.