Recently under pressure from the community, Ethereum announced on the 13th during the All-Core Developers (ACDE) meeting that it will accelerate the deployment of future protocol upgrades in an effort to respond to the community’s recent calls for faster improvements and criticisms.
(Background: Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade will launch in March; Vitalik: It can double Layer 2 capacity! Gas Limit raised for the first time in the PoS era)
(Background Supplement: Summary of Key Points from the 203rd Ethereum ACDE Meeting: What impacts will the Pectra upgrade bring?)
Ethereum has been facing dissatisfaction from the community due to its prolonged underperformance in this bull market, the sudden announcement of key developers leaving, and the continuous shipping from the Ethereum Foundation (EF). This has prompted Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to state that significant reforms will be made to the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation.
Under increasing community pressure, the Ethereum Foundation announced during the All-Core Developers meeting on February 13th that it will expedite the deployment of future Ethereum protocol upgrades.
Nixo Rokish, a member of the Ethereum Foundation’s protocol support team, tweeted on the 13th: “There was a strong consensus in the Pectra Retrospective forum that people want to accelerate the pace of forks. This means less hesitation in scope and more proactive expression of opinions.”
The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to launch in April.
According to Christine Kim, Vice President of Research at Galaxy, and meeting records from EtherWorld, the Pectra upgrade is currently in its final testing phase. Developers expect that if the public testnet upgrade goes smoothly, the Pectra upgrade will be planned to go live on the Ethereum mainnet around April 8th.
Developers also confirmed the timeline for upgrading the Ethereum public testnet during the meeting, with the team set to activate the Pectra fork on the Holesky and Sepolia testnets on February 24th and March 5th, respectively. If no significant issues arise during the testnet upgrades, the Pectra mainnet fork is expected to occur approximately 30 days after the Sepolia fork.
Cointelegraph notes that the Pectra upgrade could be the largest upgrade in Ethereum’s history, potentially including up to 20 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). In addition to improving user experience (UX), it includes a scaling proposal that doubles the number of data availability blobs (from 3 to 6). Vitalik stated that this will double the capacity of Layer 2 blockchains and significantly enhance scalability.
The Ethereum developer community is accelerating the speed of protocol upgrades.
Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko emphasized during the meeting that the most common suggestion in the Pectra Retrospective forum was to “accelerate the upgrade of Ethereum.” To this end, Beiko suggested that the scope of the next upgrade should be determined as quickly as possible after the previous upgrade goes live on the Ethereum mainnet.
Beiko further proposed to freeze the scope of the next Fusaka upgrade to EOF and PeerDAS, avoiding excessive hesitation in incorporating more EIPs that would delay upgrade progress. This would allow developers to begin researching Fusaka as soon as possible while discussing the scope of the next hard fork, Glamsterdam.
A deadline of April 10th was set during the meeting to finalize the scope for Fusaka. Fusaka is the next upgrade following Pectra and includes several EIPs, focusing on the Ethereum Object Format (EOF) aimed at improving EVM scalability and security, as well as PeerDAS (data availability sampling through peer-to-peer networks, which can improve data availability and enhance overall network efficiency and resilience).
Paradigm warns that Ethereum must accelerate.
Cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm also published an article in late January calling for Ethereum core developers to speed up the protocol upgrade process, achieving more milestones on its technical roadmap to maintain its position as the leading Layer 1 blockchain.
Ethereum can now begin to accelerate the realization of many significant improvements without sacrificing its values. Discussions about value trade-offs may be premature and could lead to rigidity.
We believe that agreeing to deliver faster is the most important thing the Ethereum community can do to expand the possible space and enable the protocol to achieve its ambitious roadmap. Accelerating the development of Ethereum will allow more people to enjoy permissionless innovation, paving the way for a truly global, trust-minimized financial system.
