Ethereum recently activated its "Pectra" upgrade, which is considered one of the most significant updates since the Merge in 2022. This upgrade aims to enhance the network's scalability, security, and user experience. Here are some key features and improvements ¹ ² ³:

- *Increased Staking Limit*: The maximum effective balance for validators has been raised to 2,048 ETH, allowing large stakers to consolidate and reducing the overall validator count. This change is expected to lighten the consensus load and support future performance upgrades.

- *Smart Account Functionality*: EIP-7702 enables Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to act like smart contract accounts, allowing for features like transaction batching, gasless transactions, and social recovery.

- *Improved Layer 2 Scalability*: The upgrade increases blob capacity, reducing transaction costs and improving scalability for Layer 2 rollups. Specifically, the target blob count per block has been increased from 3 to 6, and the maximum from 6 to 9.

- *Enhanced Validator Experience*: EIP-7002 allows validator exits to be triggered through the execution layer, enabling smart contracts and applications to manage validator lifecycle on-chain.

- *Future Upgrades*: The next upgrade after Pectra is expected to be "Fusaka," which will implement Verkle trees, a new state data structure that will improve data storage and proof efficiency.

The Pectra upgrade is part of Ethereum's long-term roadmap, which includes several phases, such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. These phases focus on sustainability, scalability, censorship resistance, state optimization, and overall refinement ³.$ETH