Ethereum Completes Pectra Upgrade: Three Major Directions Lead Future Development

Ethereum successfully completed the Pectra upgrade on May 7th. As a very important mainnet upgrade this year, Pectra has laid a new foundation for the future development of Ethereum in three key areas: staking mechanism, Layer 2 scaling, and account abstraction. Let’s take a closer look at the core points of this upgrade.

1. Staking Mechanism Optimization: Significant Increase in Single Node Limit

In this upgrade, the staking limit for a single validator node has been increased from 32 Ether to 2048 Ether. This change brings two important impacts:

1. Improve the efficiency of staking deposits and withdrawals

Ethereum previously set a single node staking limit of 32 ETH to maintain decentralization. However, this has also led to long queuing times for deposits and withdrawals during peak network periods, especially since only 8 nodes are allowed to exit or withdraw per Epoch.

After the upper limit is raised to 2048 Ether, the efficiency of fund flow will significantly improve after future node mergers. Especially during active market periods, this change can effectively alleviate queuing pressure and optimize the overall user experience.

2. Reserve space for Layer 1 scaling

Ethereum currently has over a million validator nodes. Under a mechanism that ensures fair participation in consensus for each node, the peak performance of Layer 1 has long been constrained, currently maintained at around 60 TPS.

After raising the single-node staking limit to 2048 ETH, there is hope to gradually introduce a more flexible layered consensus mechanism in the future, such as a combination model of full voting by large nodes + random voting by small nodes. This scheme is expected to significantly improve on-chain performance while slightly lowering the security threshold, laying the foundation for the scalability of Layer 1.

3. Liquidity Staking Token ( LST ) protocol benefits

The new proposal introduced by the Pectra upgrade brings groundbreaking support at the underlying mechanism level for projects including some well-known LST protocols:

• Allow direct deposit operations to be completed on the consensus layer
• Grant control permissions of the withdrawal process to smart contracts.

These changes allow certain aspects that originally relied on centralized components and manual processes to achieve a higher degree of decentralization and automation. Although there are still controversies surrounding LST discussions, the Pectra upgrade undoubtedly releases greater development space for this ecosystem.

2. Layer 2 Optimization: Data Storage Expansion to Reduce Costs

In this upgrade, the implementation of relevant proposals will directly double the Blob capacity and support dynamic adjustments.

Blob, as the core area for Layer 2 data storage and backup, is directly related to the cost structure of Layer 2. After this upgrade, Layer 2 fees will be further reduced, moving from "very cheap" to "extremely cheap", which is undoubtedly beneficial for the Layer 2 ecosystem.

Of course, this also means that the burning rate of ETH may further slow down. However, from the overall health of the ecosystem, the activity of Layer 2 and low costs undoubtedly have more long-term strategic value.

3. Important Progress in Account Abstraction

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

• Supports batch transactions for more efficient operations.
• Allows payment of Gas fees using any token (such as USDT), lowering the usage threshold.
• Introduce mechanisms such as social recovery to enhance account security and usability.

In the past, wallet functions were relatively fixed, and it was necessary to prepare ETH in advance to initiate transactions. In the future, account abstraction wallets based on new proposals will be more free and intelligent. New users will even be able to register and use wallets directly through their phone numbers, without worrying about cumbersome steps such as address management and Gas preallocation, completely bridging the "last mile" of the Ethereum experience.

Summary

The Pectra upgrade is not just a routine functional iteration; it has outlined a clearer path for the future of Ethereum in key areas such as staking mechanism optimization, Layer 2 scalability, and account abstraction. This upgrade provides new development momentum for the Ethereum ecosystem and is expected to drive the entire network towards a more efficient, convenient, and widespread direction. Future changes will continue to occur, and the development of the Ethereum ecosystem is worth our ongoing attention and participation.