Ethereum Pectra Upgrade Officially Launched: Reshaping Network Interaction and Scalability

The Ethereum network successfully activated the highly anticipated Pectra upgrade on May 7th, marking another important development milestone following last year's Dencun fork. This upgrade officially took effect at 6:05 AM Eastern Time and completed final confirmation within just 10 minutes.

The Pectra upgrade introduces several key changes, the most notable of which is EIP-7702. This innovative proposal redefines the interaction between external accounts (EOA) and smart contracts, enabling regular user wallets to execute contract logic while maintaining their original addresses for the first time. This breakthrough lays the foundation for building a smarter and more flexible user account system and is seen as a crucial step towards achieving comprehensive account abstraction.

This upgrade also optimized the validator model. EIP-7251 significantly raises the staking limit for a single validator from 32 Ether to 2,048 Ether, allowing large stakers to more efficiently consolidate capital, thereby improving the efficiency of protocol operations and enhancing the reward distribution mechanism.

In addition, EIP-7691 increases the number of Blob data blocks per block from 3 to 6, a change that significantly enhances the data processing capacity of Layer 2 while lowering the cost of Rollup transactions, providing strong support for the scalability of Ethereum.

However, the Pectra upgrade has also brought new challenges. Experts have pointed out that with the implementation of the upgrade, network bandwidth has become a new bottleneck for Ethereum. Especially considering that Blob data blocks need to be efficiently propagated in a peer-to-peer network, whether Ethereum can maintain efficient and predictable data transmission will directly impact its future scalability potential.

Security experts are also concerned about the far-reaching implications of EIP-7702. This upgrade breaks the long-held assumption that "EOA cannot execute contract code," which may expose smart contracts relying on old logic for reentrancy protection or flash loan protection to new security risks.

To address these potential risks, experts recommend that developers update their codebases in a timely manner and abandon the traditional logic of treating EOA as passive accounts. Instead, industry-standard reentrancy protection measures and more rigorous logical constraints should be adopted to effectively reduce the possible attack surface.

Despite these challenges, the Pectra upgrade is widely regarded as an important milestone in Ethereum's progression to the next stage of development. It not only redefines the network's interaction model but also lays a solid foundation for future scalability, showcasing the Ethereum ecosystem's ongoing commitment to innovation and advancement.