Ethereum Open Community: Accelerating the Deployment of a New Hard Fork, Pectra Upgrade Scheduled for April 8th

Original Article Title: "Ethereum Buckles Up! Development Community: Accelerate Deployment of New Hard Fork, Pectra Upgrade Estimated to Go Live on 4/8"

Original Article Author: Natalia Wu, BlockTempo of DooQu Trending

Ethereum has seen a continuous price decline during this bull run, with core developers suddenly announcing their departure. In addition, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has been continuously selling off tokens, leading to a burst of community dissatisfaction. This prompted Ethereum's co-founder Vitalik to announce a significant overhaul of the Ethereum Foundation's leadership.

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

Ethereum Foundation protocol support team member Nixo Rokish tweeted on the 13th, "There was a fairly strong consensus reached in the Pectra retrospective thread that people want to see the fork cadence accelerated. This translates to less hesitation in scoping and more proactivity in expressing opinions."

Ethereum Pectra Upgrade Expected in April

According to information compiled by Galaxy Research's Vice President 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 go live on the Ethereum mainnet around April 8.

Developers also confirmed the timeline for the Ethereum public testnet upgrade, with the team planning to activate the Pectra fork on the Holesky and Sepolia testnets on February 24 and March 5, respectively. If no major issues occur during the testnet upgrade period, the Pectra mainnet fork is expected to occur approximately 30 days after the Sepolia fork.

Cointelegraph noted 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 scaling proposal to double the number of data availability blobs (from 3 to 6). Vitalik stated that this will double the capacity of Layer 2 blockchains, significantly enhancing scalability.

Ethereum Development Community Accelerates Protocol Upgrade Speed

While hosting the developer meeting, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko emphasized that the most common suggestion in the Pectra retrospective forum was to "speed up Ethereum upgrades." To this end, Beiko proposed that after the last upgrade went live on the Ethereum mainnet, an attempt 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 progress by spending too much time pondering whether to include more Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). This will enable 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 enhancing the scalability and security of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) through Ethereum Object Format (EOF) and Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS, which improves data availability through peer-to-peer network sampling, enhancing overall network efficiency and resilience).

Paradigm Warns Ethereum Must Accelerate

Cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm also penned an article 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 start accelerating the realization of many impactful improvements without sacrificing its value. Discussions about value trade-offs may be premature and could lead to stagnation.

We believe that reaching consensus on faster delivery is the single most important thing the Ethereum community can do to expand the realm of possibilities and enable 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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