$ETH
The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is here! Wallet operations are smoother, and will L2 fees be slashed again?
Family! Ethereum is making big moves again! Recently, the mainnet officially activated the Pectra upgrade at the scheduled block height of Epoch 364032 — that's right, the hard fork that has been talked about in the community for half a year!
What is Pectra?
In simple terms, this is another major version update for Ethereum following the 'Merge' in 2022 and the Dencun upgrade earlier this year. The name sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it actually packages the improvements of the execution layer (Prague) and the consensus layer (Electra) together, aiming for a 'faster, cheaper, and safer' experience!
What does this upgrade bring me?
1. Wallet operations take off
Previously, transferring funds and interacting with DApps required signing a bunch of authorizations, annoying, right? Pectra introduces account abstraction (AA), so in the future, it might be as easy as tapping a couple of times like WeChat Pay, and newbies won’t be deterred by Gas fees or private key management anymore!
2. Stakers rejoice
Attention ETH stakers! The new mechanism allows for more flexible withdrawals, reducing the operational pressure on nodes (no more daily monitoring for disconnection warnings), and it may even reduce congestion across the network — after all, who doesn’t want to pay less in Gas fees?
3. L2 users money-saving alert
Didn’t the Dencun upgrade just cause L2 transaction fees to plummet? Pectra is doubling down! The increased Blob capacity means Rollups can pack more data, and L2 transaction fees might be slashed again, making on-chain users laugh out loud...
4. Maximum sense of security
The new encryption tools and communication protocols add a layer of bulletproof protection to Ethereum, increasing its resistance to hacker attacks and network delays by +10086!
Why is this upgrade particularly worth paying attention to?
Just look at the recent market trends — the anticipation for ETH ETFs is heating up, and the Layer2 ecosystem is exploding (the OP Stack, ZK Sync, and Arbitrum family are fighting), Pectra is like handing a rocket launcher to this celebration!
PS: But don’t expect Gas fees to drop to $1 tomorrow; the effects of the upgrade will take time to ferment. However, in the long run, Ethereum's moves are clearly aimed at competing for users with Solana and Bitcoin L2, making the public chain battle of 2024 increasingly exciting…