11 Mainnet Improvements Made in Ethereum’s Biggest Upgrade Since the Merge

Ethereum’s developers yesterday activated the Pectra upgrade, the network’s most significant upgrade since 2022’s Merge which saw the network transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. 

Eleven new Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) were implemented through Pectra — the largest number of any single Ethereum upgrade — with promises to level-up account abstraction, enhance staking efficiency and user experience, and improve network scalability. 

Pectra is live on Ethereum mainnet!

– Smart account wallet UX features now active
– L2 scaling data storage blobs increased by 2x
– Validator UX improvements live

Community members will continue to monitor for any issues over the next 24 hours.

— Ethereum.org (@ethereum) May 7, 2025

This recent upgrade is designed to build on last year’s much hyped Dencun upgrade that introduced ‘proto-danksharding’ to Ethereum, resulting in significantly reduced gas fees for layer 2 networks.

ETH’s price action has remained flat since Pectra activated, mirroring similar price action in the immediate aftermath of the Merge. At the time of writing, data from CoinGecko showed ETH changing hands at US$1,824 (AU$2,823), down about 1% on the day. 

Related: Vitalik Buterin Calls for Simpler Ethereum, Inspired by Bitcoin’s Design

Highlights of Pectra Upgrade: User Experience Gains

The Pectra upgrade was activated on Ethereum’s mainnet at epoch 364032 at approximately 6 am on May 7, US Eastern Time (around 8:05 pm AEST). It followed rigorous testing on Ethereum’s numerous testnets, during which several bugs and configuration issues were identified and ironed out.

It’s actually two coordinated updates combined into one: the Prague execution layer hardfork and the Electra consensus layer upgrade. The upgrade is made up of 11 separate improvement proposals, the most significant of which are EIP-7702, EIP-7251 and EIP-7691.

EIP-7702, which was partly authored by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, allows wallets to temporarily execute smart contract code, a significant step towards full account abstraction. That helps pave the way for features like social account recovery, which would significantly reduce the risk that users will permanently lose access to their accounts.

This improvement will also allow users to use dApps without having any ETH in their wallet. Instead the dApp itself can cover the gas fees, enormously improving convenience and potentially opening up new free-to-use dApp business models. EIP-7702 will also allow combining multiple actions into a single transaction — enhancing user experience and potentially reducing gas fees.

EIP-7251 is all about enhancing staking. It increases the maximum effective validator balance from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH and enables compounding staking rewards and validator consolidation. 

This increase in maximum validator balance will allow large stakers to stake all their ETH to just one validator rather than having to split it across several validators, substantially simplifying staking. However, there are also concerns that this change could see large, wealthy stakers start to dominate, leading to increased centralisation of the network.

EIP-7691 builds on the work done in last year’s Dencun upgrade, effectively doubling the throughput size for Blob data structures.

Blobs are a form of temporary data used by layer-2 rollup networks, such as Arbitrum and Optimism. This improvement could see gas fees for Ethereum layer-2s fall even further and allow for more cost-effective scaling of dApps leveraging these networks.

Despite the lack of immediate price action in response to Pectra, some in the community believe the upgrade will soon cause ETH’s price to rally.

1/➮ Today marks the most bullish ETH update ever in crypto – Pectra

✧ The update itself is indeed very impressive, with many long-awaited changes

✧ But will it solve Ethereum’s main problem – the lack of price growth?

Let’s break it down👇

— 𝗰𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗼𝗽 (@nobrainflip) May 7, 2025

Related: Fidelity Sees Opportunity in Ethereum’s Slump, Says ETH May Be Undervalued

Posting on X / Twitter, prominent crypto trader @cyclop described Pectra as “the most bullish ETH upgrade ever”, adding that the update “gave ETH exactly what it was missing — usability”.