Ethereum Open Community: Accelerating the Deployment of a New Hard Fork, Pectra Upgrade Expected to Go Live on April 8th

Original Article Title: "Ethereum in Turmoil! Development Community: Accelerate Deployment of New Hard Fork, Pectra Upgrade Expected to Go Live on April 8"

Original Article Author: Natalia Wu, BlockTempo from ChainNews

Ethereum has seen a continuous price decline during this bull market. Suddenly, core developers announced their resignation, coupled with continuous token sales by the Ethereum Foundation (EF), leading to community dissatisfaction. This prompted Ethereum's co-founder Vitalik to announce a major restructuring of the Ethereum Foundation's leadership.

Under increasing pressure from the community, the Ethereum Foundation announced at the All Core Devs' Meeting (ACDE) held on February 13 that they would expedite the deployment of future Ethereum protocol upgrades.

Ethereum Foundation protocol support team member Nixo Rokish tweeted on the 13th: "There was a strong consensus in the Pectra review forum thread that people want to accelerate the fork. This means less deliberation on scope and more proactive expression of opinions."

Ethereum Pectra Upgrade Expected in April

According to information compiled by Galaxy Research VP Christine Kim and EtherWorld Conference records, the Pectra upgrade is currently in its final testing phase. This week, developers expect that if the public testnet upgrade goes smoothly, the Pectra upgrade is scheduled to launch on the Ethereum mainnet around April 8.

Developers also confirmed the timeline for the Ethereum public testnet upgrade at the meeting. The team plans to sequentially activate the Pectra fork on the Holesky and Sepolia testnets on February 24 and March 5, respectively. If there are no major issues during the testnet upgrade, the Pectra mainnet fork date is expected to be approximately 30 days after the Sepolia fork.

Cointelegraph pointed out that the Pectra upgrade may be the largest upgrade in Ethereum's history, potentially including up to 20 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). In addition to improving user experience (UX), it includes a scalability proposal to double the data availability blob count (from 3 to 6). Vitalik stated that this would double the capacity of Layer 2 blockchains, significantly enhancing scalability.

Ethereum Development Community Accelerates Protocol Upgrade Speed

While hosting the meeting, Ethereum Core Developer Tim Beiko emphasized that the most common suggestion in the Pectra Recap Forum was to "speed up Ethereum upgrades." To this end, Beiko suggested that after the last upgrade went live on the Ethereum mainnet, an effort should be made to quickly define the scope of the next upgrade.

Beiko further proposed freezing the scope of the next Fusaka upgrade to Ethereum Object Format (EOF) and Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) without delaying the upgrade timeline by spending too much time deliberating whether to include more Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). This would allow developers to start researching Fusaka as soon as possible while discussing the scope of the next hard fork, Glamsterdam.

During the meeting, a deadline of April 10 was set to finalize the scope of Fusaka. Fusaka is the next upgrade after Pectra, which includes several Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), with a focus on improving the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) scalability and security through Ethereum Object Format (EOF) and Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS, which enhances data availability through peer-to-peer network data sampling, improving overall network efficiency and resiliency).

Paradigm Warns Ethereum Must Accelerate

Cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm also penned a note in late January urging Ethereum core developers to accelerate the protocol upgrade speed, achieve more milestones on its technical roadmap, and maintain its position as the leading Layer 1 blockchain.

Ethereum can now begin accelerating the realization of many high-impact improvements without sacrificing its value. Discussions about value trade-offs may be premature and could lead to ossification.

We believe that reaching consensus on faster delivery is the most important thing Ethereum as a community can do, expanding the space for possibilities and enabling the protocol to achieve its ambitious roadmap.

Accelerating Ethereum's development will allow more people to benefit from permissionless innovation, paving the way for a truly global, trust-minimized financial system.

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