The next major upgrade of Ethereum, called Pectra, is expected to officially launch on May 7, 2025, focusing on three core improvements:

1. Account Abstraction (EIP-7702): Allows External Owned Accounts (EOA) to temporarily convert into smart contract accounts, supporting batch transactions, gas payment, and other features, reducing transaction confirmation time from 12 seconds to 3 seconds, significantly enhancing user experience.

2. Validator Optimization (EIP-7251): Increases the staking limit for a single validator from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, reducing the number of nodes to lower network load, and compresses validator activation time from 12 hours to 13 minutes.

3. Layer 2 Scalability (EIP-7691): Increases the blob data space from 3 per block to 6 (with a maximum of 9), improving Rollup throughput and reducing L2 transaction latency to 0.8 seconds.

This upgrade aims to enhance scalability, reduce costs, and optimize staking efficiency, providing stronger support for ecological applications (such as DeFi, RWA). $ETH