Ethereum Pectra Upgrade: Important Milestones in Staking Optimization, L2 Scaling, and Account Abstraction

On May 7th, Ethereum successfully completed the Pectra upgrade. As a crucial mainnet upgrade this year, Pectra lays a new foundation for the future development of Ethereum around three core directions: Staking, L2 scaling, and account abstraction. Let's take a moment to review the key highlights of this upgrade.

1. Major Improvements to the Staking Mechanism

In this upgrade, the staking limit for a single validator node has been significantly increased from 32 Ether to 2048 Ether. This change has brought about two significant impacts:

1. Improve the efficiency of Staking deposits and withdrawals.

Ethereum previously set the single node staking limit at 32 ETH to maintain the decentralized nature of the network. However, this has also led to the issue of excessively long queuing times for deposits and withdrawals during peak periods, especially considering that only 8 nodes are allowed to exit or withdraw per Epoch.

The new 2048 ETH cap will greatly enhance capital flow efficiency, especially during active market periods, effectively alleviating queuing pressure. Although the network is currently at a relatively low point, deposits and withdrawals can usually be completed within 10 minutes, this improvement prepares for potential network congestion in the future, overall optimizing the user experience.

2. Reserve development space for L1 expansion

Ethereum currently has over a million validation nodes. Under a mechanism that ensures fair participation in consensus for each node, the peak performance of L1 has long been maintained at around 60 TPS.

After raising the single-node staking limit to 2048 ETH, a more flexible hierarchical consensus mechanism may be introduced in the future, such as a combination model of full voting by large nodes and random voting by small nodes. Although this plan slightly lowers the security threshold, it is expected to significantly improve on-chain performance and lay the foundation for the scalability of L1.

3. Positive Impact on the LST Protocol

The new proposal introduced by the Pectra upgrade provides significant support for the underlying mechanisms of the LST protocol:

• Allow deposit operations to be completed directly on the consensus layer.
• Grant control over the withdrawal process to smart contracts

These improvements allow the segments that originally relied on centralized components and manual processes to achieve a higher degree of decentralization and automation. Although discussions around LST remain controversial, the Pectra upgrade undoubtedly releases greater development space for this ecosystem.

2. L2 Optimization: Blob Expansion to Reduce Costs

In this upgrade, the Blob capacity has been directly doubled and supports dynamic adjustment. As the core area for L2 data storage and backup, the Blob directly affects the cost structure of L2. After this upgrade, L2 fees will further decrease, moving from "very cheap" to "extremely cheap," which is undoubtedly a significant benefit for the L2 ecosystem.

This may lead to a further slowing of the burning rate of Ether. However, from the perspective of the overall health of the ecosystem, the activity and low cost of L2 undoubtedly have more long-term strategic value.

3. Important Advances in Account Abstraction

The introduction of the new proposal opens up new horizons for Ethereum account abstraction, significantly enhancing the flexibility of wallets and user experience:

• Supports batch transactions, making operations more efficient.
• Allows the use of any token (such as USDT) to pay for Gas, lowering the barrier to entry.
• Introduce mechanisms such as social recovery to enhance account security and usability.

In the past, wallet functions were relatively fixed, and it was necessary to prepare ETH in advance to initiate transactions. In the future, account abstraction wallets based on new proposals will be more free and intelligent. New users can even register and use wallets directly through their mobile phone numbers, without having to worry about the cumbersome steps of address management and Gas preloading, completely bridging the "last mile" of the Ethereum experience.

Summary

The Pectra upgrade is not just a routine functional iteration; it paints a clearer development path for the future of Ethereum in key areas such as Staking mechanism optimization, L2 scalability, and account abstraction. This upgrade provides new momentum for the Ethereum ecosystem, promising to drive the entire network towards a more efficient and user-friendly direction. As these improvements are gradually implemented, we look forward to seeing more innovations and breakthroughs in the Ethereum ecosystem in the future.