At yesterday’s Ethereum ACDE meeting, Ethereum core developers discussed the upcoming Pectra upgrade, including the confirmation of including EIP-7702 and EOF (EVM Object Format). The former is an account abstraction proposal proposed by Vitalik Buterin; the latter is an EVM upgrade proposal covering 11 EIPs aimed at improving the scalability and security of EVM.
Pectra upgrade to include EOF and EIP-7702
What are EOF and EIP-7702?
Plans to launch the Pectra upgrade in Q1 next year
Yesterday, Ethereum core developers held the 189th All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) conference call, with developer Tim Beiko summarizing the meeting on X.
The next major Ethereum update, the “Pectra upgrade,” will include EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), with a focus on EOF (EVM Object Format) and Vitalik Buterin’s account abstraction proposal EIP-7702.
During this meeting, participants agreed to implement EOF and EIP-7702 in the Pectra upgrade, but EOF will not be included in the devnet-1 test network. Tim Beiko stated:
EOF is an upgrade proposal for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) aimed at improving the scalability and security of EVM. It is understood that the EOF upgrade covers 11 EIPs, collectively addressing some inefficiencies, high execution costs, and security issues in the current EVM design, enhancing the EVM code of Ethereum Layer 1 and Layer 2. The upgrade was initially planned to be implemented in the Shanghai upgrade but was later removed.
EIP-7702 is Vitalik Buterin’s proposal to replace “EIP-3074” for account abstraction. This proposal introduces a new transaction type that allows external owned accounts (EOA) to temporarily adopt smart contract features during transactions and return to their original state after the transaction ends. This new transaction type can enhance account abstraction functionality, avoid security issues with EIP-3074, and achieve all use cases of EIP-3074 without the need for a hard fork.
Discussion during the meeting suggested that EIP-7702 may encounter issues due to nonce/balance/codehash being zero when creating an account, so this proposal still needs fine-tuning and testing, and if no issues arise, it will be implemented in the Verkle fork.
During the previous ACDE meeting, Ethereum core developers decided that they plan to launch the Pectra upgrade in the first quarter of 2025.
Additionally, the Pectra upgrade will also include EIP-7251 (or known as the “Increase Maximum Effective Balance” proposal), raising the Ether stake limit for each validator from 32 to 2,048. This proposal is expected to significantly reduce the number of validators, thus reducing the operational burden on operators.
