ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, the Ethereum mainnet successfully activated the Pectra upgrade at 6:05 AM Eastern Time, marking the most significant network update since the Merge in 2022.This hard fork includes 11 EIP improvement proposals, primarily focusing on three major areas: enhancing staking efficiency, optimizing user experience, and improving Layer2 scalability. The successful deployment of the testnet Hoodi in March laid the foundation for this upgrade. Pectra sets the stage for the Fusaka upgrade, which will introduce key technologies such as Verkle Trees and PeerDAS.Among the highlights of this upgrade is the EIP-7702 account abstraction scheme, which allows regular wallets to temporarily execute smart contract functions. In the future, users will be able to experience innovative features such as third-party payment of Gas fees, batch transaction packaging, and even recovery of lost private keys through social contacts. In terms of the staking mechanism, the ETH staking limit for a single validator node has been significantly increased from 32 to 2048, allowing institutional stakers to reduce operational complexity through node merging.For Layer2 scalability, the Blob data capacity per block has doubled to 6 (peaking at 9), and the proto-danksharding technology based on last year's Dencun upgrade continues to deepen, which is expected to reduce transaction costs on Rollup chains like Arbitrum by over 90%. The technical team has also addressed several long-standing pain points: the activation time for validator nodes has been reduced from 12 hours to 13 minutes, the execution layer can directly control node exits to enhance key security, and the on-chain storage of historical block hash data has improved the reliability of decentralized oracles.

ChainCatcher news, former Galaxy Digital research vice president Christine Kim posted on the X platform that Ethereum developers are considering removing EOF (Ethereum Object Format) from the Fusaka upgrade. However, unlike before, Kim believes they might actually take action this time.

ChainCatcher news, according to Cointelegraph, Ethereum core developers are considering raising the Gas limit to 150 million in the Fusaka hard fork, which is four times the current limit. This proposal has been put forward through EIP-9678, and developers believe it will significantly expand the execution capacity of Ethereum Layer 1.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum developers @linoscope and @JustinDrake jointly proposed the EIP-7917 proposal, aimed at restructuring the validator election process through a deterministic proposer preview mechanism. The core innovations of this proposal include: precomputing a deterministic proposer sequence at the beginning of the epoch; eliminating the prediction bias caused by the existing RANDAO randomness + effective balance weighting mechanism; and maintaining full compatibility with existing infrastructure.Under the current design, the dynamic changes in validators' effective balances can lead to an inability to accurately predict future epoch proposers, posing risks to pre-confirmation protocols such as MEV-boost. It is estimated that the new scheme can enhance the security margin of on-chain applications like oracles by 40%.

ChainCatcher news, reported by The Block, states that Ethereum core developers plan to terminate support for the Holesky testnet in September 2025 and are preparing for its role transition and eventual deprecation.Deprecating testnets is a common practice; Ethereum developers previously discontinued Kiln, Ropsten, and Rinkeby in 2022, and stopped Goerli last year. Holesky was launched in September 2023 and is one of Ethereum's two main testnets, the other being Sepolia. It has been a key public testnet for staking, infrastructure, and protocol development.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum developer eric.eth stated that the common wallet user experience will completely disappear in just a few years. Users will no longer need to click "connect" and "sign." Users will need to converse with agents, who will handle all on-chain tasks for them.

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinTelegraph, Ethereum core developers reached a consensus on accelerating the deployment of future protocol upgrades during the "All Core Devs" meeting on February 13. Nixo Rokish, a member of the Ethereum Foundation's protocol support team, stated that the Pectra review report shows strong community support for speeding up the fork pace, which means reducing delays in the scope of upgrades and more actively soliciting feedback.The Pectra upgrade, scheduled for release in April, will be the largest upgrade in Ethereum's history, containing up to 20 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), involving enhancements to cryptocurrency wallet functionality and data availability expansion. Ethereum Foundation researcher Tim Beiko stated that the Pectra system contracts will go live on the mainnet on February 17.The development team has also set a deadline of April 10 for the Fusaka upgrade, which primarily focuses on improving the transaction packaging process. Developers must submit EIP proposals by March 13, and the community needs to express opinions on the inclusion of proposals by March 27.

ChainCatcher news, according to Cointelegraph, Jesse Pollak, head of the Base protocol, recently stated in a conference call with Ethereum founders and developers that based rollups are "a flexible and powerful tool that will allow us to use them for Base, bringing it closer to Ethereum and increasing the security guarantees it provides."Ben Jones, a director at the Optimism Foundation, added that based rollups will improve collaboration between the Ethereum base layer and L2.Ethereum L2 networks (such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base) have charged hefty fees by deploying high-speed, centralized sorters (i.e., the order of transaction processing and addition to blockchain blocks), but this comes at the cost of unification.Based rollups, proposed by Ethereum core developer Justin Drake in March 2023, return this process to the base layer, improving the decentralization of the network, as the block building process will be executed by all Ethereum validators rather than a single centralized sorter.At the same time, native rollups will enhance the way transactions are executed on the base layer, making the network more composable.However, these L2s will forfeit a significant portion of their revenue gained through maximum extractable value. Data from Dune Analytics shows that Arbitrum, which supports the transition to based rollups, has generated $210 million in revenue from its centralized sorter, while Base's revenue stands at $96.2 million.It is worth noting that based rollups or native rollups may bring more revenue to Ethereum's base layer and positively impact the price of ETH. However, the decentralized sorting of the Ethereum base layer means that transactions will be confirmed within 12 seconds, rather than the approximately 1 second typical of many Ethereum L2s. Several Ethereum L2 leaders also support the deployment of "FABRIC," an infrastructure that supports based rollups.Daniel Wang, CEO of Ethereum L2 Taiko, stated that the protocol is willing to adopt the FABRIC standard to "address" Ethereum's interoperability issues, saying, "We have been waiting for the FABRIC standard so that we can work together and provide a complete solution."

ChainCatcher news, reported by Bitcoin.com, indicates that concerns are growing within the Ethereum ecosystem about its pace of development.Jesse Pollak, head of Base (the second-layer network of Bitcoin), criticized Ethereum's current roadmap, stating that it is too conservative and calling for the originally scheduled updates in 2027 to be moved up to early 2026.Ethereum Foundation developer Dankrad Feist shares a similar view, stating that the current growth plan "lacks ambition" and pointing out issues with the existing upgrade process. Feist also questions the notion that scalability can only be achieved on second-layer networks, emphasizing that large-scale scalability of the Ethereum base layer is feasible.

ChainCatcher news, reported by The Block, Ethereum developers plan to launch the Pectra upgrade for the network in March 2025, setting specific milestones before the mainnet fork.According to a core developer conference call held on Thursday, after coordinating with client software teams, a new client upgrade and hard fork for the Ethereum test networks Sepolia and Holesky is expected to be released in February. If the fork on the test networks goes as planned, the mainnet will launch next month.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum developer Eric.eth tweeted: "Ethereum still needs great leaders, especially in the ever-changing landscape of cryptocurrency competition. It is still too early to implement subtraction and opaque leadership methods.I would prefer Vitalik to remain the leader of Ethereum rather than slowly stepping back over the years; it was his early leadership that brought us to where we are today.I strongly oppose the notion that 'Ethereum does not need the Ethereum Foundation or leaders.' This is not only because seeking leadership is a human instinct, but also because this technology is still in a very early stage, making such an approach unsuitable. The chain can be decentralized, but that does not mean that leadership should also be decentralized."

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum protocol developer and Prysm maintainer Terence posted on the X platform that the Ethereum core developers meeting (AllCoreDevs) has reached a preliminary consensus to increase the blob target/max from 3/6 to 6/9, with specific implementation requiring further testing and results from the development network.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum developer Paul Berg has released a proposal regarding multiple native tokens on Ethereum, aimed at improving the user experience when transferring tokens, making native financial products easier to deploy, and enhancing the innovative potential of Ethereum L2 applications.The proposal is named EIP-7809, which suggests adding a backward-compatible extension to the EVM that, if approved through Ethereum's new proposal process, will allow fungible tokens to operate with "native-like" properties.ETH has been operating as Ethereum's native token, and almost all other Ethereum-based tokens are built on top of this network but do not possess most of the same "native" characteristics as ETH. This limits functionalities such as direct token transfers using opcodes and transferring multiple tokens in a single contract call. EIP-7809 introduces four new opcodes:MINT & BURN, allowing for token supply management through minting and burning tokens;BALANCEOF for checking token balances;NTCALL for token transfers that require contract calls;NTCREATE for creating contracts that include upfront token deposits.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum developers have introduced a temporary test network named Mekong for the Pectra upgrade. This testnet is designed to trial specific code changes before deploying them to other public testnets and ultimately to the mainnet.According to a blog post by Ethereum core developers, the testnet aims to explore the impact of these changes. The post notes that although the testnet will run for a short period, it is considered to be fully functional for Pectra, containing all proposed EIPs. The developers stated, "We may see some minor specification changes or smaller EIPs, but the features included here will make their way into the existing public testnets and eventually into the Ethereum mainnet."Initially, the Pectra upgrade plan included 20 Ethereum Improvement Proposals, but this number has been reduced to about 8. These modifications focus on improving user experience and network efficiency when Pectra launches on the mainnet.Key changes being tested include enhancements to the user experience of crypto wallets and account abstraction, increasing the maximum validator staking limit from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, updating deposit and withdrawal mechanisms, and more.

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, Ethereum developers agreed on Thursday to split the upcoming hard fork Pectra into two batches, aiming to make the large-scale upgrade less cumbersome and reduce the risk of mistakes or errors. The first package may be released in 2025 (as early as February).The first part of Pectra will include Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including EIP-7702, which aims to improve wallets. The second part will see an EIP aimed at upgrading the Ethereum Virtual Machine (referred to as EOF).

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum protocol developer and Prysm maintainer Terence recently shared his views on his social platform, stating that Ethereum's roadmap is simpler than many people think, with most of it achievable within the next four years: maximizing data availability, improving censorship resistance, reducing trust through off-chain block construction and better slot utilization, achieving faster consensus finality, enhancing the staking user experience, finalizing staking economics, limiting execution layer storage, and implementing stateless execution.

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, Ethereum developers have set a final timeline for the "Dencun" upgrade. If everything runs smoothly on the Sepolia and Holesky testnets on January 30 and February 7, the developers will determine the date for "Dencun" to land on the Ethereum mainnet, with the current target being the end of February or early March.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum researchers have initiated the "RIP-7560 Native Account Abstraction" proposal, aimed at introducing changes to the consensus layer protocol rather than relying solely on higher-level infrastructure. This proposal merges EIP-2938 and ERC-4337 into a comprehensive native account abstraction proposal, suggesting that Ethereum transactions be divided into multiple steps, including validation, execution, and post-transaction logic. The validity of a transaction is determined by the outcome of the transaction's validation step.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko summarized the latest Ethereum core developer execution meeting (ACDE), which introduced Devnet updates, new content for Dencun, and provided a comprehensive overview of Reth:Devnet-8 Status Update: The network is being finalized, and many clients have begun pushing new updates to it. Meanwhile, testing of the MEV/block building process has started using the developer tool system Kurtosis. Nethermind shared that their blob transaction pool is ready, and after a few days of testing on a single node, they have deployed it to all Dencun test nodes. Geth's blob transaction pool is also nearing completion. Besu is conducting broader maintenance on its transaction pool (to limit the size of Blob + non-Blob transactions), which is expected to be released in the next version. Erigon is still developing its pool, aiming to be ready for devnet-9.The meeting continued the discussion from last week's ACDC call regarding whether to add a constant cap to the validator activation queue. Subsequently, the proposal was officially named EIP-7514 (Add Maximum Epoch Loss Limit). In short, this would slow down the growth rate of the ETH staking percentage in the worst-case scenario.The meeting discussed another last-minute proposal: adding an opcode to the EVM to reveal the base fee of blobs. We have a similar opcode that can reveal the BASEFEE of EIP-1559, which was introduced simultaneously with the activation of the EIP. This allows L2 to more easily determine the correct gas price to charge users based on L1 data costs.The meeting discussed some updates to EIP-4788, which stores the beacon root in contracts on the EL. Over the past few weeks, we have conducted multiple audits and fuzz tests on the contracts, leading to some subtle changes described in this PR. The first is to explicitly handle a 0 timestamp, rolling it back (like other invalid timestamps) instead of returning 0. The second change is the buffer size. Assuming the slot time has changed, considering how modulo works, the original contract would lead to storage waste. By using a prime number (8191), it should utilize 100% of the buffer regardless of the slot time. Finally, gas optimizations were made to reduce the number of times CALLDATA needs to be loaded. Auditors will review these changes, and the final report is expected before the next ACDE. To ensure the smooth progress of fuzz testing and implementation, developers agreed to merge the proposed changes now.The meeting discussed how clients should handle cases where the system contract address is part of the state but is empty at the end of execution. Although this is practically impossible on the mainnet, it is an edge case that arises in testing by setting the address at genesis. Given the uniqueness of this edge case and the lack of explicit normative behavior, developers agreed to spend more time thinking about this issue and continue the discussion in Monday's testing call. This is a specification change.All of the above content is planned to be included in devnet-9. The client teams unanimously agreed that everything should be implementable and testable before next week's ACDC. The release date for devnet-9 will be agreed upon in that call.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum community developer terence.eth tweeted that the Deneb/Cancun upgrade official testnet Devnet 8 has been launched and is progressing smoothly.Previous report, Devnet 8 is the first dedicated test network that will activate all relevant Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) finalized for the Dencun upgrade.