Ethereum is about to schedule its Pectra Upgrade in late April or early May 2025 after the Hoodi Testnet deployment. The upgrade will make Ethereum more decentralized and censorship-resistant.
What is Pectra Upgrade?
The Pectra Upgrade is an acronym for Ethereum’s Prague Electra series of upgrades that seek to make Ethereum more scalable and decentralized and provide better security than its current tech stack. As a result, the blockchain, EVM, and its entire tech stack will be able to process fast transactions, be more censorship-resistant, and become far more resilient to any kind of failure.
The upgrade is scheduled to take place approximately one month after the Hoodi Testnet deployment which happened on 20 March 2025.
Current Problems in Ethereum
Ethereum faces a lot of problems in its current form most of which are expected to be solved by the Pectra Upgrade except quantum resistance.
Censorship Threats
Despite Ethereum having 1 million validators, its technology is still highly vulnerable to censorship. This is because 33% of Ethereum’s validators are in the United States which makes it easy for the government to ban it anytime. In 2024, this threat almost materialized before the Ethereum ETFs were approved.
Further, one-third of Ethereum’s validators are on a cloud-baed virtual computer provided by a cloud giant like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, which means that any fallout between these companies and Ethereum might result in the former de-boarding Ethereum validators from its platform.
Temporary Scaling via Blobs
Ethereum also faces risks from the Dencun Upgrade (ProtoDank Sharding) as several Layer-2 solutions now complain that the blob fees have been volatile in recent times. This volatility not only makes them less predictable but also makes it difficult for the blob spaces to be filled in times of low demand, rendering most of them vacant.
A permanent scaling solution in ETH would be sharding which is the way of pushing up Ethereum’s validator count to a certain number and then distributing them into smaller groups called Shards. Each Shard will be able to validate transactions and add them independently to the blockchain.
Inefficient Layer-2 Alignments
Layer-2 blockchains like Shibarium, Base, and Optimism have been trying hard to achieve a streamlined alignment with Ethereum. In the words of Vitalik Buterin, this task is one of the most critical ones for developers in recent times.
Centralization Risks
Ethereum has 1 million validators which are mostly concentrated in the United States.
Therefore, the need is to better spread them which is only possible by lowering the Validator Stake amount. Currently, Ethereum mandates 32 ETH to become a validator which is roughly $64k in the current markets. This amount is huge for several low-income countries where people’s annual income is far less than this.
Vitalik Buterin proposes to lower this stake value to 1 ETH or around $2000 as per current pricing. This is expected to increase the
Benefits
Ethereum is expected to get the following benefits from the Pectra Upgrade:
- A faster chain with a block finality of 1 second or less. This will result in more adoption.
- Extremely light chain due to the presence of full nodes and partial nodes which will not download the entire chain history but will have a record of the latest “n” blocks.
- Increased decentralization will make Ethereum more censorship-resistant.
Drawbacks
There is one major drawback in the Pectra Upgrade which is regarding quantum resistance. Several quantum computers have already been developed in China, the USA, Japan, and Europe. Blockchains have a threat from quantum computers which have the power to decode each transaction’s nonce values and can steal funds from legitimate transactions.
Surprisingly, only a few blockchains such as Algorand are quantum resistant. Bitcoin has no threat from quantum computers because of its unique SHA 256 algorithm. However, the same is not present in Ethereum.
Further Reading
Why did Ethereum choose Decentralization Over Quantum Security?
Ethereum chose to act on decentralization first to neutralize censorship threats from governments and platforms like AWS on which its validators heavily relied.
What was the Dencun Upgrade?
The Dencun Upgrade or Proto Dank Sharding was an Ethereum upgrade that uses a temporary storage space inside every Ethereum block called the Blob. This blob acted as a rollup just like an L2 rollup.
What are Blobs?
Blobs are the temporary storage solutions that provide a rollup facility to Layer-2 and Layer-2 protocols on Ethereum. Each block supports 4 to 5 blobs.
Is Vitalik Centralizing Ethereum?
No, decisions on Ethereum are taken by voting where community members participate to make decisions.
