PANews reported on February 7 that according to CoinDesk, Ethereum developers have officially set a testing date for the Pectra upgrade, which is the first upgrade of the network in 11 months and is expected to be released in April.
Ethereum's core developers decided at their biweekly "all core developers" call on Thursday to begin testing Pectra on the Holesky testnet on February 26, with subsequent testing planned for the Sepolia testnet on March 5. If these tests are successful, developers will meet again on March 6 to determine the date for the official release of the upgrade. According to Tim Beiko, head of protocol support at the Ethereum Foundation, developers expect the upgrade to go live on the mainnet in early April.
Pectra will include a range of improvements - with a particular focus on wallets and validators. Combining two separate upgrades, Prague and Electra, Pectra includes eight major improvements to Ethereum. The most anticipated of these is EIP-7702, a proposal that aims to improve the user experience of cryptocurrency wallets. Addresses on Ethereum, called externally owned accounts (EOA), will be reconfigured to support smart contract functionality. Another major feature of Pectra, EIP-7251, will allow validators to increase the amount of ETH they can stake - from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. It will also help speed up the process of setting up new nodes - the current system causes validators to wait in line for weeks to start new infrastructure.
