Ethereum Devs Poised to Split Blockchain's Next Big Upgrade, 'Pectra,' in Two

On Thursday, Ethereum developers will decide if Pectra will be split into two forks. If developers agree on the split, the first package could come in 2025, as early as February.

Ethereum developers are considering splitting the highly anticipated Pectra upgrade into two parts due to its large size and complexities.

Currently, Pectra is on track to be Ethereum’s biggest hard fork to date. Some developers have argued that the entire package of new features has become unwieldy.

During an All Core Developers call last week, Ethereum developers began discussing the possibility of splitting the hard fork in two.

EF DevOps Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi, who was one of the core developers pushing to split Pectra, told CoinDesk over Telegram that “we're talking about splitting it into two forks, mainly to reduce the risk of a bug and to enable faster shipping of both forks.”

According to a report by Christine Kim, vice president of research at Galaxy Digital, the first part of Pectra would include Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) including EIP-7702, which aims to improve wallets – famously scribbled by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 22 minutes. The second part would see EIPs aimed at upgrading Ethereum’s Virtual Machine, known as EOF.

On Thursday, Ethereum developers will decide in their upcoming All Core Developers Consensus layer call if Pectra will be split into two forks.

Possible downside

If developers agree on the split, the first package could come in 2025, as early as February.

While Ethereum developers haven’t disagreed much with the potential of splitting the fork, EF researcher Ansgar Dietrichs told CoinDesk that one downside would be pushing EIP-7594, or PeerDAS, to the second package. PeerDAS aims to improve data availability on Ethereum, and with the delay in the feature going live, there might be slightly higher fees for layer-2 blockchains for the time being.

“PeerDAS is crucial to make sure L2s have more room for future throughput growth, so the sooner we ship it, the more certain we can be that we can support whatever throughput L2s might need over the next year,” Dietrichs told CoinDesk. “For now, we still have some room to go even before PeerDAS. So hopefully it won't matter at all. Worst case, L2s will have slightly higher fees again for a few months while we wait for the second half of the Pectra fork.”

Dietrichs said that, "Ultimately, I think a split is likely still the right decision.”

“I think everyone agrees that it's a really big fork, so a natural thing to do is just to break it into two,” said EF Researcher Alex Stokes on last week’s call, according to Kim’s report. “Generally, smaller forks are less risky.”

Read more: Ethereum Set for Overhaul of Crucial Programming Standard With 'EVM Object Format'

The above references an article that was originally published on Mon, February 6, 2023, by CoinDesk and has since been updated.