One of Ether Major Updates, Pectra Upgrade to Make Changes to Gas Fees, Validator Rights, and More

September 21, 2011 - This week, Ether's core developers decided to split the network's next major upgrade, Pectra, into at least two parts, with the first update due to be released around February 2025, the company said. Currently, Gas fees on Ether, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and other second-tier networks must be paid in ETH regardless of what tokens are transferred, and a proposal included in the first part of Pectra, EIP-7702, would effectively end this requirement by allowing users to pay Gas fees with other, more versatile cryptocurrencies. Another improvement is EIP-7251, which would allow Ether pledgers to be rewarded for the portion of their pledge that exceeds 32 ETH. For example, a user who currently pledges 40 ETH is currently unable to earn from the additional 8 ETH or receive voting rights. This will significantly reduce bandwidth requirements across the Ethernet network. Two other proposals included in the initial release of Pectra, EIP-6110 and EIP-7002, will also enable fully automated and license-free pooling of ETH interests for the first time. And the rest of Pectra may have to wait until 2026.