Ethereum Next Upgrade "Pectra" Could Improve Wallet UX and Increase Staking Limit

Reported by Coindesk, Ethereum developers, fresh off the successful Dencun upgrade, which enabled a major change to make it cheaper to transact on layer-2 blockchains, are moving ahead in planning the blockchain's next improvements.

The contents of the next upgrade, "Pectra," are nowhere near finalized, but developers have previously said their aim with the upgrade will be to ship it while simultaneously working on the chain's next upgrade.

“The idea with Pectra is to try and find a bunch of small wins that we can get relatively quickly while we prototype the larger stuff,” Tim Beiko, protocol support lead at the Ethereum Foundation, said in an interview on The Protocol podcast.

Attendees at Thursday's Etheruem All Core Developers call – a bi-weekly meeting of the blockchain's primary developers – signaled that Pectra is likely to include Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3074, a proposed set of code changes for improving the user experience (UX) of Ethereum wallets. Specifically, the proposal will allow users to batch transactions and sign off on them all at once.

Another one of the main changes likely to occur in Pectra will be a lift to the staking limit for validators, from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH – a 64-fold increase. That proposal, known as EIP 7251, would allow large staking providers, like Coinbase or Lido, to consolidate their validators operating the Ethereum blockchain – while allowing them to avoid constantly creating new validators every time they have another 32 ETH to stake.

According to Dune Analytics, over 1 million validators are currently operating the Ethereum network, which has led to concern over excessive latency. Developers have been looking for ways to slow the rate at which new validators enter the system – potentially bogging it down. EIP 2751 is pitched as a way to lighten the operational load for larger stakers, consolidate the number of validators on the blockchain, and allow staking providers to deploy less resources to staking and validating.

The name "Pectra" is a portmanteau of two simultaneous upgrades happening on the different layers of the blockchain. The execution layer, where protocol rules are enforced, will undergo the "Prague" upgrade, and the consensus layer, which ensures that blocks are validated, will go through the "Electra" upgrade.