#Pectra升级 The technical highlights of Ethereum in 2025 are the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades, with the Pectra upgrade scheduled to go live on May 7 on the mainnet, expected to reach epoch height 364032. What do the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades mean for Ethereum?
Ethereum's dominance is under threat. Solana and the BNB Smart Chain are closing the gap in DEX trading volume and transaction fees. Factors contributing to this gap include slow transaction speeds and high costs, developer awareness, fragmented liquidity, and reduced value accumulation for L1 due to the rise of L2.
The Pectra and Fusaka upgrades aim to expand Layer 2. The upcoming Pectra and Fusaka upgrades are scheduled to go live on the mainnet on May 7, 2025, and by the end of 2025, respectively. Notably, these code changes are not intended to strengthen ETH's position as a 'super hard currency,' nor to enhance Ethereum's performance as a more censorship-resistant blockchain.
Pectra will focus on proof of stake, blob, and account abstraction improvements:
• Staking: EIP-7251 will increase the maximum effective balance for staking from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH to address the network pressure brought by the current scale of over 1 million validators.
• Blob: EIP-7691 will increase the target and maximum blob capacity from 3 to 6 and from 6 to 9 respectively, in order to publish more data to L1 while keeping costs low.
• Account abstraction: EIP-7702 will transform externally owned accounts (EOA) into smart contract wallets, benefiting from features like bundled transactions, gas sponsorship, and social recovery.
Fusaka will focus on expanding Ethereum as a data availability layer and may upgrade the Ethereum virtual machine:
• The path to complete Danksharding: The PeerDAS, to be introduced in EIP-7594, will serve as a stepping stone to achieving complete data availability sampling.
• Upgrade EVM: The Ethereum object format will bring a more structured method for contract creation while reducing runtime overhead, thereby improving developer experience and user safety.
Investments in Layer 2 scalability are a double-edged sword. Concerns exist regarding Ethereum's competitiveness as a data availability layer in this vision, as well as the sustainability of the value appreciation of Ethereum assets.
The competition in data availability is fierce. Ethereum, adopting complete Danksharding technology, still lags behind Celestia, EigenDA, and NearDA in terms of raw data throughput and cost efficiency. However, Ethereum remains the most secure blockchain, which may be a key consideration for data availability.
How to continuously accumulate the value of ETH is still a topic worth actively exploring. Suggestions such as re-pricing the blob market may prompt Layer 2 to shift to cheaper alternatives, while expecting Layer 2 to support ETH by charging a certain percentage of fees is overly subjective. Rollup-based solutions provide the strongest support for value accumulation, but are not currently a priority on the roadmap.
