Share this article
Ethereum Developers Confirm Plan to Split 'Pectra' Upgrade In Two
The decision to split up the upgrade wasn't unexpected. Developers had discussed that Pectra was becoming too ambitious to ship all at once, floating the idea of splitting it up to minimize the risk of finding bugs in the code.
Updated Sep 19, 2024, 7:15 p.m. Published Sep 19, 2024, 7:15 p.m.
Ethereum developers agreed on Thursday to split their upcoming hard fork, Pectra, into two packages, in a move to make the massive upgrade less unwieldy and reduce the risk of missteps or bugs.
The decision to split up the upgrade wasn't unexpected. Developers had discussed previously that Pectra was becoming too ambitious to ship all at once, floating the idea of splitting it up in order to minimize the risk of finding bugs in the code.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Pectra was on track to be Ethereum’s biggest hard fork to date. (A hard fork is the technical term for when a blockchain splits from its original, and is the method used by Ethereum to implement major software upgrades.) Now, developers will be able to focus on a much narrower scope. Previously, developers shared they would aim to have the upgrade live in early 2025; that is still the case for the first part of the Pectra package.
The core developers decided that eight Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) will be included in the first package, which includes EIP-7702, aimed at improving the user-experience of wallets, and famously scribbled by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 22 minutes.
The second package is up to be changed over the next few months, but as of now could include proposals that aim to make changes to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, known as EOF, along with introducing a feature called PeerDAS, which improves data availability sampling and ultimately is beneficial for layer-2 blockchains.
The developers acknowledged that the scopes of these upgrades can change over time, so solidifying this upgrade wouldn't be wise in this moment.
"There seems to be agreements to split current Pectra somehow," said Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes, who led the call. "And then downstream, we can figure out what comes next."
“I hear everyone that, it can be tricky to not want to put new things in. I would lean towards, again, keeping the scope very small, just because then that's going to maximize our chances of actually shipping the second fork very quickly with respect to this first one,” Stokes added.
Read more: Ethereum Devs Poised to Split Blockchain's Next Big Upgrade, 'Pectra,' in Two
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
