After the Ethereum Pectra upgrade: The underlying architecture is solid, PeerDAS is poised for action—where are developers headed?

Key Points

• Pectra (Prague + Electra) is the largest hard fork bundled upgrade since The Merge, containing 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) aimed at synchronously reducing data costs, simplifying smart account operations, and optimizing validator operations.
• EIP-7691 doubles the Blob target capacity to 6 and raises the hard cap to 9. This reduces the Gas fees for L1 data availability (DA) to about 1 Gwei or less, and the exchange fees on major L2s briefly dropped to about $0.02.
• Now, each externally owned account (EOA) can be converted into a smart account through a single transaction (EIP-7702), enabling Gas fee sponsorship, stablecoin payment fees, and batch user experiences without contract migration.
• The validator cap has been raised to 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251), significantly reducing DevOps costs for large operators without significantly impacting decentralization.
• PeerDAS will be the next step in the Fusaka upgrade, with its importance to Roll-up far exceeding any single EIP in Pectra.

OKX Ventures' Perspective: Pectra itself is not a "turning point for modular data availability (DA)"; it is the last key piece that allows L2 to attract mainstream users while Ethereum maintains its settlement dominance. The future winners will be those who (a) externalize all user experience friction through 7702-style accounts, (b) leverage the benefits of Blob to drive new data-intensive verticals (on-chain AI, order book DEX, content storage), and (c) double down on proof compression technology stacks before PeerDAS.

On May 13, OKX Ventures hosted a Twitter Space event, inviting guests who were directly involved in coding or infrastructure operations post-fork to delve into these changes.

During this event, OKX Ventures closely examined these changes with those who had to deliver code or run hardware after the fork went live:

• Derek Lee -- Core Protocol Product Manager at Offchain Labs
• Leonardo Lerer -- Core Product Manager at StarkWare
• Qi Zhou -- Co-founder of EthStorage
• Pok Kopp -- Co-founder of Ether.fi
• Esme Zheng -- Investment Manager at OKX Ventures

1. Who changed direction and who felt the shockwaves in the first week?

Arbitrum -- Derek did not need to rewrite any code, but each Arbitrum instance must upgrade its embedded Geth client. The only EIP he truly cares about is 7691: doubling the Blob target capacity means more low-fee space for DEX and gaming users.

Post-Pectra Progress:

• BoLD's permissionless fraud proof entered the testnet in April and is planned to go live on the mainnet "before Q4."
• Stylus compiles hundreds of Rust/C contracts daily—llama.cpp inference and real-time chess engine are examples Derek showcased.
• TimeBoost has replaced the "first-price auction" mechanism in the Arbitrum sequencer's memory pool, improving fairness in transaction inclusion.

Starknet -- Leo Pectra mainly adjusted Starknet's Blob cost model; the fee schedule for Cairo 1.x remains unchanged. The bigger shift is in StarkWare's own roadmap: the reduction in L1 data availability (DA) costs has lessened the urgency for "volition" (selective off-chain data) and redirected attention back to stateless client research.

Decentralization Milestones:

• Staking v2 (proof by block rewards) will be released this quarter.
• Sequencer as a Service (14)—a 3f + 1 Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) cluster—will go live in 2025; cheaper Blobs may allow them to shorten proof generation cycles without increasing costs.

EthStorage -- Qi Zhou Higher Blob activity is a boon—his storage layer now plans to provide ongoing incentives when data is dropped from Ethereum after two weeks. Pectra also mandated a full fleet Geth upgrade; an operator group using version v1.13.8 froze in the middle of the epoch.

Shockwaves:

• Node Operators: Within 48 hours, 732 validators increased their staking amount to over 32 ETH.
• Roll-up Users: As Blob Gas fees fell back to about 1 Gwei, exchange fees on major L2s dropped to below two cents, despite fluctuations in the memory pool.
• Infrastructure Developers: The rapid point release of Go-Ethereum kept all developers running archive nodes highly vigilant.

OKX Ventures Perspective: Cheap Blobs, one-time accounts, and larger validators are not headline features; they are the foundational "pipeline" that allows the next headline feature to land smoothly. PeerDAS will soon validate this assertion.

2. In-depth Analysis of EIPs

Scaled Smart Accounts (EIP-7702)

EIP-7702 allows any externally owned account (EOA) to act as a smart account in a single transaction, inheriting batch calls, Gas sponsorship, and stablecoin payment capabilities without contract migration.

Starknet has been in the AA (account abstraction) world since the genesis block. Leo illustrates: the productivity app FocusTree silently deploys an account for each mobile user and begins minting achievement NFTs supported by sponsorship fees. Users are not even aware they are operating on-chain.

EthStorage will use paymasters to fund the first ten transactions for users—e.g., deploying personal websites with one click via Blob.

Arbitrum already has GMX, Camelot, and Plays integrating the 7702 process through third-party AA providers. Derek expects the first direct metric improvement to be transaction success rates and failed exchange refunds, followed by a second wave of Web2 native user onboarding channels.

OKX Ventures Perspective: 7702 eliminates the final self-custody user experience barrier. Investable areas are those paymasters that perform Gas arbitrage across different tokens and chains, as well as secure middleware enforcing spending limits and fraud rules at the AA layer.

Cheaper Data (EIP-7691)

Arbitrum: Each Roll-up competes for the same Blob pool; doubling capacity merely provides "breathing room before congestion pricing kicks in."

Starknet only released state differences; cheaper Blobs did not unlock new features but reduced the total cost per transaction and helped avoid a shift to "volition" (selective off-chain data).

EthStorage estimates that the new capacity (about 3 TB every 12 days) finally makes it possible to store static websites smaller than 100 MB—like vitalik.ca—entirely in Blobs. It is worth noting that the Gas fees for on-chain transactions are now the bottleneck, often exceeding long-term storage costs. Qi is pushing for block-level access lists and higher Gas limits to alleviate this constraint.

OKX Ventures Perspective: The data focus is shifting back on-chain; the near-term addressable market (TAM) is non-financial Blob-native content (AI inference weights, gaming assets, social graphs), which can tolerate Blob expiration if retrieval incentives exist. Long-term tail retrieval and proof markets will become key infrastructure.

Validator Cap of 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251)

Data Point: So far, only 732 out of 1,000,000 validators have increased their staking amount—no signs of centralization panic.

Arbitrum & Starknet: Pure operational victory—lower DevOps costs with minimal user impact. Theoretically, the penalty risk for each validator has increased, but Leo sees this as an "interesting academic question" rather than a practical barrier.

EthStorage: Allows running hot/cold validator replicas without increasing infrastructure spending; makes large-scale Blob proofs more reliable. Qi emphasized the operational advantages of staking services: fewer devices, the same yield, and running hot backup validators without a double hardware budget.

OKX Ventures Insight: Hardware cost savings will flow into re-staking and shared security markets rather than directly to end users; protocols focusing on EigenLayer-style will absorb the released liquidity. More idle ETH → more security capacity.

3. Post-Pectra Roadmap Signals

PeerDAS (Fusaka Hard Fork, EIP-7623)

Every speaker used the same adjective: Existence. Derek called it "critical and non-negotiable"—Offchain Labs already has Prism engineers involved in specification discussions, as Arbitrum's fraud proof throughput is ultimately limited by DA bandwidth. Leo views PeerDAS as "the foundation of the entire L2 roadmap"; once sampling goes live, he can increase Starknet's proof frequency without worrying about Blob costs. Qi has already written the economic foundation for that world—EthStorage will pay incentives to peers to maintain their availability after the protocol forgets to sample the Blob.

Verkle Trees and Historical Data Expiration

Qi believes these two paths are complementary. Verkle trees reduce witness data size and enable stateless clients; historical data expiration reduces full node disk space by discarding old blocks. He estimates about 50% storage savings, but this is limited to the existence retrieval market—Portal + EthStorage—paying someone to keep cold data. Leo is less concerned about savings and more interested in the functionalities unlocked by Verkle trees: a mobile device that can verify Ethereum without synchronized state. He wants to observe how the Beacon client handles stateless mode before transplanting that idea to Starknet.

SSZ Object Transactions (EIP-6404 Series)

Qi is leading the first public testnet. Its promise is: smaller witness data, faster decoding, and perfect alignment with the Verkle tree object hash model. Derek currently holds an agnostic attitude ("Roll-up can absorb any format"), while Starknet is just monitoring—Cairo has already serialized with its own field element layout.

Contract Size 128 KB (EIP-7907)

If you've ever split a monolithic application into 24 KB chunks, you understand the pain. Qi and the Curve development team are leading this patch, but the obstacle is not consensus—it's a need for a DDoS-resistant Gas meter for very large deployment transactions.

Block-Level Access Lists

Qi's benchmarks show that parallel preloading state can reduce Geth's IO wait time by about 70%. This, in turn, proves the reasonableness of raising Gas limits, thus directly lowering the cost of Blob releases. He is collecting mainnet tracking data to validate this trade-off.

OKX Ventures Insight: Pectra is a "comfortable" release; the next twelve months will focus on data availability, stateless validation, and ultimately providing developers with space to deploy large, complex contracts without workaround.

4. Macro Picture—How Will This Expand the Moat?

The core metric to watch is settled value. Leo expects the compound growth curve of L2 throughput to surpass all other key performance indicators (KPIs), believing that "every Roll-up will bring its own exponential growth." If this assertion holds, all these L2s anchored to the settlement layer—Ethereum—will capture the entire flywheel effect.

Developer retention appears to finally be trending healthy. Qi's litmus test is the Web2 teams' trial of AA wallets and subsidized Blobs—both of which did not exist in a credible form six months ago.

The security budget is about to be repriced. Derek points out that validator consolidation combined with mechanisms like EigenLayer's re-staking will shift yields from idle staking to active validation services. Ether that was previously idle in personal 32 ETH hot wallets is transforming into remote proof income for oracles, bridges, and DSPs.

Is Pectra a "pivot"? This claim is somewhat misleading. The group members unanimously agree: even if Blob utilization is only 40%, large Roll-ups will not turn to Celestia or EigenDA. Ethereum's data availability (DA) remains the most cost-effective trust premium in the crypto space. Continuously expanding the base layer, the delegation market will solve the remaining issues on its own.

Derek's core point is: "It's not a complete pivot, but rather doubling down on enhancing Ethereum's speed and ensuring the comfort of Roll-ups."

Qi adds: Killer user experience upgrades will still prototype first on L1—7702 has already done so, and PeerDAS sampling will follow this path—before cascading down to L2.

OKX Ventures Perspective: The synergy between a highly modular Roll-up stack and a continuously expanding L1 capacity curve creates a flywheel unmatched by any monolithic chain. Pectra did not "save Ethereum"; it merely cleared the last user experience gap before PeerDAS boosts DA by 25 times.

5. Hot Topics: Is Pectra "Enough"?

DA Choices for Roll-ups: There is unanimous agreement on no—Arbitrum, Starknet, and EthStorage do not plan to turn to external DA, even if Blob utilization remains below 60%.

Non-technical Leverage: Derek believes attention should remain on L1 scaling and Roll-up support; there is no need for issuance games. Qi states that L1 scaling experiments (block-level access lists, larger Gas limits) will originate from Ethereum and propagate back to L2.

6. OKX Ventures Future Investment Strategy

Smart Account Infrastructure will become the default consumer entry point. EIP-7702 combined with third-party paymaster mechanisms will compress the two-year gap between crypto-native contract design and large-scale user onboarding. OKX Ventures prioritizes investments in modular paymaster liquidity networks, intent relays, and AA risk scoring engines, enabling any Web2 application to offer "stablecoin payment for Gas fees" and "one-click registration" from day one.

Blob Native Content is the next blank space. A storage incentive layer that guarantees Blob retrieval after protocol expiration is highly promising. Cheap Blobs combined with a storage incentive layer will create a medium where games, AI models, and social media can be fully built on Ethereum's security.

Re-staking will absorb the funds saved by validators. EIP-7251 releases hardware budgets and activates idle Ether. Protocols capable of converting these stakes into measurable security—such as oracle proofs, bridge validation, and shared sequencer pools—will reap excess returns. OKX Ventures anticipates that "investment-grade" re-staking targets will become scarce and is actively funding teams with the clearest risk-adjusted accounting.

PeerDAS is the real turning point. When sampling DA is implemented, Roll-ups can dilute marginal DA costs by 10 times without relinquishing trust in Ethereum. Teams currently building data sampling clients, proof compression circuits, or DA markets will hold the core tooling layer after Fusaka activation. OKX Ventures is actively seeking projects that can get ahead of Fusaka in the tooling, proof compression, and data availability markets.