Ethereum Pectra Upgrade: Key Changes and Potential Challenges

Recently, Ethereum completed the highly anticipated Pectra upgrade, marking another important milestone in the network's development following last year's Dencun fork. This upgrade officially went into effect on May 7 and was finalized in a short period.

Pectra has introduced several significant changes, the most notable of which is EIP-7702. This change redefines the interaction between external accounts (EOA) and smart contracts, allowing regular user wallets to execute contract logic while maintaining the same address, laying the foundation for building smarter and more flexible user accounts. This is seen as a key step towards achieving comprehensive account abstraction, which is expected to enable users to batch process transactions, simplify token authorization processes, and achieve seamless interaction across different applications.

In addition, the Pectra upgrade also involves the optimization of the validator model. EIP-7251 significantly increases the staking limit for each validator to 2,048 ETH, allowing large stakers to integrate capital more efficiently, thereby optimizing protocol operation efficiency and improving the reward distribution mechanism. At the same time, EIP-7691 doubles the number of Blob data blocks per block to 6, significantly enhancing Layer 2's data processing capability and is expected to reduce Rollup transaction costs.

However, this upgrade also brings new challenges. Experts point out that with the implementation of Pectra, network bandwidth may become a new bottleneck for Ethereum. Especially since Blob data blocks need to be propagated in a peer-to-peer network, whether Ethereum can efficiently and predictably transmit data will directly affect its scalability. Experts emphasize that as the size of Blob data blocks continues to expand, merely increasing average bandwidth is no longer sufficient; reducing the variability of data propagation is equally crucial.

Security experts are also concerned about the far-reaching implications that EIP-7702 may bring. This upgrade breaks the long-held assumption that "EOA cannot execute contract code." Therefore, smart contracts that rely on old logic for reentrancy protection or flash loan protection may face new risks as a result. Security companies have warned that EOA can now execute logic, introducing a whole new risk vector for contracts that did not anticipate this feature.

To address these potential risks, experts recommend that developers update their codebases as soon as possible to avoid continuing to treat EOAs as passive accounts. Instead, industry-standard reentrancy protection measures and more rigorous logical constraints should be adopted to reduce the potential attack surface.

Despite these challenges, the Pectra upgrade is widely regarded as an important milestone for Ethereum's progression to the next stage. It not only redefines the interaction between EOA and smart contracts but also involves the optimization of the staking model and improvements in data throughput, laying a solid foundation for Ethereum's future scalability.

With the implementation of the upgrade, participants in the Ethereum ecosystem, including developers, validators, and users, need to closely monitor the impact of these changes and adjust their strategies in a timely manner to adapt to the new network environment. In future development, how to balance innovation and security, and how to effectively leverage new features while avoiding potential risks will become important issues that the entire Ethereum community needs to address together.