The march of progress with Ethereum continues unabated, and now the core developers have an eye on the first quarter of 2025 to release the Pectra upgrade. This follows the successful Dencun update back in March of last year. In two substantial ways, Pectra will improve Ethereum. First, it brings in the Ethereum Virtual Machine Object Format, including approximately 11 improvement proposals that consolidate the EVM code for both Layer 1 and Layer 2. As important is the incorporation of EIP-7251, increasing the maximum effective balance for single validators to a big—get this—2,048 ETH in one giant leap. This adjustment has been made to smoothen the operations process and give a chance to have fewer, but much higher-staking, validators, which simplifies the state of the network.

And yet more improvements are afoot, thanks to EIP-7702, proposed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, which would allow Ethereum account addresses to become smart contract wallets temporarily during transactions and then revert to their original state post-transaction—so much the better for user flexibility and with a better veil of security.

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