During the first 2025 All Core Devs Execution (ACDE) call, Ethereum developers agreed to activate the Pectra upgrade on the mainnet in early to mid-March.

This large-scale upgrade includes the implementation of a wide range of EIPs, featuring improvements to account abstraction technology, changes to validator operations, optimization of gas fees, and increased network performance.

A significant change is the planned increase of the validator stake limit from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH.

Roughly 30 minutes before the meeting, engineers launched the fifth devnet to test the planned modifications. Since November, the temporary Mekong testnet has also been used for this purpose.

Key developer Tim Beiko presented a roadmap for further testing in major public testnets:

By the end of January, the team will finalize the fork blocks.
By February 3, they will prepare client releases.
On February 12, Pectra will go live on Sepolia.
On February 19, it will be deployed to Holesky.

In order to streamline development, they decided not to create additional ephemeral test networks for each revision; instead, they will conduct shadow forks of existing main testnets.

Frederic Cervantes, a protocol security researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, shared that a third-party audit of Pectra’s system contracts has concluded with no critical issues identified.

Context

In May 2024, developers decided to finalize preparations for the upgrade by Q1 2025. In September, they discussed splitting it into two phases to expedite deployment.