Testing of the Pectra upgrade for Ethereum will begin in February

What’s new? Ethereum developers have officially set testing dates for Pectra, the network’s first upgrade in 11 months. Pectra will contain a number of improvements, with a particular focus on wallets and validators. However, preparations for the upgrade come at a time of increased scrutiny for Ethereum, which has faced community criticism due to increased competition from other projects.

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What else is known? Ethereum developers during the “All Core Developers” meeting decided to start testing Pectra on February 26 in the Holesky testnet, and further testing in the Sepolia testnet is scheduled for March 5.

If these tests are successful, the developers will meet again on March 6 to determine when to launch the upgrade officially. According to Tim Beiko, the head of protocol support at the Ethereum Foundation NPO, developers expect the upgrade to go live on the mainnet in early April.

Pectra includes eight major improvements. Among the most anticipated is EIP-7702, known as account abstraction. It is designed to improve the user experience with the wallet and allow the wallet to be used as a smart contract.

Another significant Pectra feature, EIP-7251, will allow validators to block up to 2048 ETH in staking instead of the previous 32 coins. This change is expected to help large validators consolidate the operations of their nodes (currently, blocking more than 32 ETH requires the use of multiple nodes).

It will also help speed up the new node setup process — the current system has led to weeks-long queues for validators looking to deploy new infrastructure.

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The Ethereum community has been facing a positioning crisis over the past few weeks. The native token ETH has lagged behind other cryptocurrencies in terms of profitability, and competing networks like Solana have drawn attention and talent from the Ethereum ecosystem, the first programmable blockchain in history and still the most popular so far.

Amid controversy, mostly related to the Ethereum Foundation, which is coordinating the updates and is currently undergoing a leadership change, developers hope Pectra will help put the network on a more sustainable footing.