🎉 The #CandyDrop Futures Challenge is live — join now to share a 6 BTC prize pool!
📢 Post your futures trading experience on Gate Square with the event hashtag — $25 × 20 rewards are waiting!
🎁 $500 in futures trial vouchers up for grabs — 20 standout posts will win!
📅 Event Period: August 1, 2025, 15:00 – August 15, 2025, 19:00 (UTC+8)
👉 Event Link: https://www.gate.com/candy-drop/detail/BTC-98
Dare to trade. Dare to win.
Ethereum Pectra upgrade implemented, stake mechanism optimization leads future development
Ethereum Pectra Upgrade: Three Major Directions Leading Future Development
Ethereum successfully completed the Pectra upgrade on May 7, which is an extremely important mainnet upgrade this year. Pectra establishes a new foundation for the future development of Ethereum around three core areas: staking mechanisms, layer 2 scaling, and account abstraction. Let's go through the key highlights of this upgrade together.
1. Staking Mechanism Optimization: Significantly Increased Single Node Limit
In this upgrade, the staking limit for a single validator node has been increased from 32 Ether to 2048 Ether, which brings two important significances:
1. Improve the efficiency of staking deposits and withdrawals.
In the past, Ethereum set the single-node staking limit to 32 ETH to maintain decentralization. However, this also led to the problem of excessively long queuing times for deposits and withdrawals during peak network periods, especially since only 8 nodes are allowed to exit or withdraw per Epoch.
This upgrade will increase the single node limit to 2048 ETH. In the future, after the node merger, the efficiency of fund flow will be significantly improved. This change will not only effectively alleviate queuing pressure during peak periods such as bull markets but also prepare in advance for potential network congestion that may arise, thereby optimizing the overall user experience.
2. Reserve space for a layer of expansion
Currently, Ethereum has over a million validating nodes. With the mechanism ensuring fair participation of each node in the consensus, the peak performance of Layer 1 has long been limited, currently maintaining at around 60 TPS.
After raising the single-node staking limit to 2048 ETH, it is expected that a more flexible hierarchical consensus mechanism will be gradually introduced in the future, such as a combination model of full voting by large nodes + random voting by small nodes. This plan is expected to significantly release on-chain performance while slightly lowering the security threshold, laying the foundation for the scalability of Layer 1.
3. Benefits of liquid staking token protocols
The two improvement proposals introduced by the Pectra upgrade bring groundbreaking support at the underlying mechanism level for the ecosystem, including multiple liquid staking token protocols:
These two changes allow parts of the process that originally relied on centralized components and manual workflows to achieve a higher degree of decentralization and automation. Although discussions surrounding liquid staking tokens are still controversial, the Pectra upgrade undoubtedly releases greater development space for this ecosystem.
2. Layer 2 Optimization: Data Capacity Expansion Reduces Costs
In this upgrade, the implementation of two improvement proposals will directly double the Blob capacity and support dynamic adjustments.
The Blob serves as the core area for layer 2 data storage and backup, directly impacting the cost structure of layer 2. After this upgrade, layer 2 fees will be further reduced, moving from "very cheap" to "extremely cheap," which is undoubtedly a positive for the layer 2 ecosystem.
Of course, this also means that the burning rate of ETH may further slow down. However, from the perspective of the overall health of the ecosystem, the activity of layer two and low costs undoubtedly have longer-term strategic value.
3. Significant Progress in Account Abstraction
The improvement proposal introduced in this upgrade opens a new chapter for Ethereum account abstraction, significantly enhancing the flexibility of wallets and the user experience.
In the past, wallet functions were relatively fixed, and ETH had to be prepared in advance to initiate transactions. In the future, the account abstraction wallet based on the new proposal will be more free and intelligent. New users can even register and use the wallet directly through their mobile phone number, without worrying about cumbersome steps such as address management and Gas pre-setting, completely bridging the "last mile" of the Ethereum experience.
Conclusion
The Pectra upgrade is not just a routine functional iteration; it outlines a clearer path for the future of Ethereum in key areas such as optimization of the staking mechanism, layer two scalability, and account abstraction. Future changes will continue to occur, so let us pay attention to, participate in, and build the development of the Ethereum ecosystem together.