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Ethereum’s Pectra hard fork happened on mainnet like clockwork. While the code shipped cleanly, the next test begins now: How will the ecosystem take full advantage of Pectra’s offerings?

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Starknet action:

Starknet is seeing an uptick in network usage to about 50k active wallets over the last two weeks. That’s largely thanks to Focus Tree, a gamified productivity app onboarding ~110k users to Starknet.

It’s simple to use: Set time commitments not to touch your phone. Succeed by earning “tiles” of different rarities that you can add to your garden (tiles are tradeable and tokenized as NFTs). The below left image is what your garden looks like at the start; the right when you’ve practically abandoned your phone.

Focus Tree’s UX is impressive. Wallets are created on the backend automatically, transactions are gas-free (thanks to AVNU) and session keys eliminate any transaction popups.

— Donovan Choy

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Pectra is live

Ethereum’s most ambitious upgrade since the Merge is now live.

The Pectra hard fork, which activated smoothly shortly after 6 am ET, delivers a powerful set of upgrades to Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers, affecting everything from validator operations to transaction UX and data availability.

What’s changed?

The upgrade introduces several important features, grouped roughly into three categories:

Smart accounts (EIP-7702):

This upgrade lets EOAs temporarily behave like smart contracts, opening the door to batched transactions, stablecoin and sponsored gas payments — a massive UX unlock, according to Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs (which built Across and UMA).

For example, “users will be able to sign a single intent that seamlessly triggers actions across chains — no need for native gas, no extra wallet setup and no extra developer work,” Lambur told Blockworks. “It gets us closer to a world where bridging is invisible and cross-chain coordination just happens under the hood.”

Data availability scaling (EIP-7691):

By doubling blobspace capacity from six to 12 blobs per block, Ethereum increases throughput for rollups and reduces L2 fees. But as Ansgar Dietrichs pointed out, saturation of this new capacity would be good for Ethereum provided it can continue scaling bandwidth to avoid too much fee pressure as demand grows.

Validator UX and efficiency:

Pectra raises the maximum effective validator balance from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, which Alluvial co-founder Matt Leisinger calls “a meaningful unlock for institutions.”

“Institutions can now autocompound rewards natively — no more skimming and aggregating 32 ETH to stay efficient,” Leisinger told Blockworks.

Bohdan Opryshko at Everstake thinks it may be the “most institution-friendly update yet.” He notes EIP-7002 also allows validators to exit using execution-layer controls, reducing trust assumptions for stakers and protocols alike — altogether making “staking at scale with operational clarity” possible for more conservative capital.

What happens next?

Pectra sets the stage for Fusaka, Ethereum’s next major upgrade — now tentatively pushed to 2026. That fork is expected to introduce PeerDAS, a more efficient data availability sampling scheme for rollups, and continue laying the groundwork for future upgrades like Verkle trees and full account abstraction.

But in the coming months, attention will shift to ecosystem adoption as teams try to showcase the real-world capabilities of the upgrade. 

How will wallets, L2s and dapps move to support EIP-7702? We can expect features like batched transactions, gas sponsorship and stablecoin fee payments.

According to OP Labs' Sam McIngvale, “apps drive this adoption curve.”

“Wallets will follow once there's clear demand,” McIngvale told Blockworks. “If widely adopted, 7702 could finally make one-click onboarding and abstracted UX the norm.”

Now that rollups can post more data to Ethereum cheaply, how long will it take to saturate that bandwidth? This could have consequences for rollups’ adoption of alternative DA layers such as EigenDA, Celestia and Avail. If L2 activity fails to match blob supply, scaling momentum could stall. Conversely, if demand rises too quickly, Ethereum may need to accelerate PeerDAS or further blob increases to prevent bottlenecks.

Large operators can collapse thousands of validators into a few, but testnets couldn’t simulate how much that will improve efficiency, so it will be interesting to observe the concrete effects.

Solo stakers may benefit indirectly, according to Preston van Loon, a core developer with Offchain Labs. Fewer attestations from consolidated validators means lower network bandwidth requirements.
“It really does help everybody,” van Loon told Blockworks. “It's hard to say which group has the outsized benefit.”

Dashboards tracking validator set composition, message propagation and slashing rates will become key indicators.

The “unpredictability of network behavior” may be a risk in the future, MIT professor and Optimum co-founder Muriel Médard warned. “As blob sizes and message throughput increase, Ethereum’s ability to propagate data efficiently and predictably will define how far it can scale,” Médard told Blockworks.

Considering the fork involved more EIPs than any prior upgrade, Pectra’s quiet launch may signal just how much Ethereum has matured as a decentralized protocol. Still, the protocol has a long way to go and faces more competition than ever.

— Macauley Peterson

Union’s improvements upon Tendermint consensus through CometBLS, coupled with ZK proving through Galois, allow for a broadly scalable, cost efficient, and low latency IBC implementation that is feasibly scalable across every existing blockchain, virtual machine and runtime. Union’s implementation offers modular crosschain interoperability without the need for trusted intermediaries.  

Polygon CDK goes multistack

Polygon’s Chain Development Kit (CDK) — now called the “Agglayer CDK” — is targeting chains built on competing rollup tech stacks.

A new configuration called the “CDK OP Stack” will enable any chain developed with Optimism’s OP Stack (the most widely used rollup stack today) to natively integrate with Polygon's Agglayer. The Agglayer is Polygon’s zk-powered interoperability layer, with about 13 live L2s presently connected to the Agglayer.

“Build your rollup with some other stack, but come join our interop layer,” is the idea.

Other rollup stacks, such as Arbitrum Orbit, Gelato’s ABC Stack and more are “under consideration” to be added to the Agglayer CDK.

Chains integrated to the Agglayer benefit from seamless interoperability and unified liquidity across all chains.

But the key selling point is the absence of a “rent-seeking tax” to connect to the Agglayer, as per an official press release. That is unlike the OP Stack, which levies a fee of 2.5% of total sequencer revenues or 15% of the chain’s gas fee profits (whichever is higher). That comes only if chains choose to join the Optimism Collective, which is entirely optional.

— Donovan Choy