The Pectra upgrade, which will be the next Ethereum hard fork, will be launched on the mainnet after completing its deployments on the Sepolia and Holesky testnets, scheduled for February. It will be in March when Pectra finally reaches the mainnet.
As defined last week at the Ethereum developers meeting, the Sepolia and Holesky networks will receive the hard fork on February 12 and 19, respectively. Once the implementation is reviewed, an announcement will be made on which day in March it will be launched on the mainnet.
Originally, the Pectra update was planned to reach the Ethereum mainnet on December 31, 2024. However, due to the lack of some tests, it was decided to postpone the date.
Another decision that was made regarding the implementation last September was the division into two hard forks, due to the number of changes that were originally intended to be implemented, which was described as ambitious. At the moment, there is no known date for the arrival of the second package.
Among the most anticipated changes, in addition to security and usability improvements, are EIP-7702, which improves account abstraction, and EIP-7251, which will increase the maximum ETH capacity that a validator can stake, taking it from 32 to 2048 ETH.
What is account abstraction?
To use the Ethereum network, there are two types of accounts: Externally owned accounts and smart contract accounts.
An externally owned account is managed by a single private key ,with which transactions are signed. In this type of account, commission payments are debited from the account balance.
Smart contract accounts, rather than being managed by private keys, are controlled either by other contracts or addresses. One such account can respond to multiple accounts.
The implementation of EIP-7151 aims to remove this distinction between accounts. That is, all accounts will operate under the smart contract account model. This would unify the functionality of using accounts, as an individual account would have the same capabilities as a contract account.
Vitalik Buterin himself, creator of Ethereum, has been talking about the benefits of this type of account since 2022. Basically, it would be like seeing wallets without private keys, controlled by a smart contract.
If implemented successfully, it is possible to start seeing wallets that do not offer a recovery system through seed phrases ,but even through email, since it will be the smart contract that is responsible for making the backup in a decentralized way.
Account abstraction also brings benefits in gas management (commissions) since financing for the payment of commissions from third parties can be allowed.
