Key Points

• Pectra (Prague + Electra) is the largest hard fork bundle upgrade since The Merge, including 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) aimed at simultaneously reducing data costs, simplifying smart account operations, and optimizing validator operations.
• EIP-7691 doubles the Blob target capacity to 6 and raises the hard cap to 9. This has caused the gas fee for L1 Data Availability (DA) to drop below about 1 Gwei, and the exchange fee on the main L2 has also briefly dropped below about $0.2.
• Now, every Externally Owned Account (EOA) can be converted to a Smart Account through a single transaction (EIP-7702), enabling gas fee sponsorship, stablecoin payment fees, and a batch user experience without the need for contract migration.
• The validator cap was increased to 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251), significantly reducing DevOps costs for large operators without significantly affecting decentralization.
• PeerDAS will be the next step in the Fusaka upgrade and will be far more important to the Roll-up than any single EIP in Pectra.

OKX Ventures’ view : Pectra itself is not the “turning point for modular data availability (DA);” it is the last critical piece of the puzzle that enables L2 to attract mass-market users while Ethereum maintains settlement dominance. The future winners will be those who (a) externalize all UX friction via 7702-style accounts, (b) leverage the benefits of Blob to drive new data-intensive verticals (on-chain AI, order book DEX, content storage), and (c) double down on the proof-of-squeeze compression stack before PeerDAS.

OKX Ventures hosted a Twitter Space event on May 13th, inviting guests who were directly involved in code writing or infrastructure operations after the fork to discuss the changes in depth.

At the event, OKX Ventures took a close look at the changes with those who have to deliver code or run hardware after the fork goes live:

• Derek Lee – Core Protocol Product Manager at Offchain Labs
• Leonardo Lerer – Core Product Manager at StarkWare
• Qi Zhou – Co-founder of EthStorage
• Pok Kopp – Co-founder of Ether.fi
• Esme Zheng – Investor at OKX Ventures

1. Who changed direction and who felt the shock waves during the first week?

Arbitrum - Derek didn’t have to rewrite any code, but every Arbitrum instance had to upgrade its embedded Geth client. The only EIP he really cared about was 7691: doubling the Blob target capacity means more low-fee space for DEX and gaming users.

Progress after Pectra:

• BoLD’s permissionless fraud proofs entered the testnet in April and are scheduled to be launched on the mainnet “before Q4.”
• Stylus compiles hundreds of Rust/C contracts every day - the llama.cpp reasoning and real-time chess engine were examples Derek showed off.
• TimeBoost has replaced the “first-price auction” mechanism in the Arbitrum sorter memory pool, improving the fairness of transaction inclusion.

Starknet – Leo Pectra mainly adjusts Starknet’s Blob cost model; the fee schedule for Cairo 1.x remains unchanged. The bigger shift is in StarkWare’s own roadmap: the reduction in L1 data availability (DA) costs has reduced the urgency for “volition” (i.e., selective off-chain data) and redirected attention to stateless client research.

Decentralization Milestones:

• Staking v2 (Proof of Stake by Block Rewards) will be released this quarter.
• Collator-as-a-Service (14) — a 3f+1 Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) cluster — will be available in 2025; cheaper blobs may allow them to shorten proof generation cycles without increasing costs.

EthStorage – Qi ZhouHigher Blob activity is a boon — his storage layer now plans to provide ongoing incentives when Ethereum discards data after two weeks. Pectra also forced a fleet-wide Geth upgrade; a group of operators using v1.13.8 froze mid-epoch.

Shockwave:

• Node Operators: In 48 hours, 732 validators increased their stake above 32 ETH.
• Roll-up users: With Blob Gas fees falling back to ~1 Gwei, redemption fees on the main L2 dropped to under two cents, despite fluctuations in the memory pool.
• Infrastructure Developers: Go-Ethereum’s rapid point release puts all developers running archive nodes on high alert.

OKX Ventures’ view : Cheap blobs, disposable accounts, and larger validators are not headline features; they are the basic “plumbing” that enables the next headline feature to land smoothly. PeerDAS will soon verify this assertion.

2. EIP in-depth analysis

Scaling Smart Accounts (EIP-7702)

EIP-7702 allows any externally owned account (EOA) to behave as a smart account in a single transaction, inheriting batch call, gas sponsorship, and stablecoin payment capabilities without the need for contract migration.

Starknet has been in the AA (account abstraction) world since the genesis block. Leo gave an example: the productivity app FocusTree quietly deployed an account for each mobile user and began minting achievement NFTs supported by sponsorship fees. Users didn’t even realize they were operating on the chain.

EthStorage will use pay-masters to fund a user’s first ten transactions — for example, deploying a personal website with one click via Blob.

Arbitrum has already integrated 7702 processes with GMX, Camelot and Plays through third-party AA providers. Derek expects the first direct indicator to improve transaction success rate and refunds for failed exchanges, followed by a second wave of Web2 native user import channels.

OKX Ventures view: 7702 removes the final self-custodial user experience barrier. Investable areas are payers that do gas arbitrage between different tokens and chains, and security middleware that enforces spending limits and fraud rules at the AA layer.

Cheaper Data (EIP-7691)

Arbitrum: Every Roll-up competes for the same pool of blobs; doubling capacity simply “provides breathing room before congestion pricing kicks in.”

Starknet only publishes state differences; cheaper blobs unlock no new functionality, but reduce the overall cost per transaction and help avoid the move to “opt-in” (opt-in off-chain data).

EthStorage estimates that the new capacity (about 3 TB every 12 days) finally makes it possible for static websites smaller than 100 MB - including vitalik.ca - to be stored entirely in Blobs. One thing to note: Gas fees for on-chain transactions are now the bottleneck, often exceeding long-term storage costs. Qi is pushing for block-level access lists and higher gas limits to ease this constraint.

OKX Ventures’ view: The data focus is shifting back to the chain; the near-term potential market (TAM) is non-financial Blob native content (AI reasoning weights, game assets, social graphs), which can tolerate Blob expiration if there are retrieval incentives. Long-term tail retrieval and proof markets will become key infrastructure.

Validator cap 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251)

Data Point: Only 732/1,000,000 validators have increased their stake to date — no centralization panic.

Arbitrum & Starknet: Pure operational win - lower DevOps costs, minimal impact on users. Theoretically, the risk of slashing for each validator has increased, but Leo believes this is an "interesting academic question" rather than a practical obstacle.

EthStorage: Allows running hot/cold validator replicas without increasing infrastructure expenditures; makes large-scale blob proofs more reliable. Qi highlighted the operational advantages of staking services: fewer devices, same returns, and running hot standby validators without doubling the hardware budget.

OKX Ventures Insight: Hardware cost savings will flow to the re-staking and shared security markets, rather than directly to end users; EigenLayer-style protocols will absorb the released liquidity. More idle ETH → more security capacity.

3. Pectra Post-Roadmap Signal

PeerDAS (Fusaka hard fork, EIP-7623)

Every speaker used the same adjective: existential . Derek called it “critical and non-negotiable” — Offchain Labs already has Prism engineers involved in spec discussions, because Arbitrum’s fraud proof throughput is ultimately limited by DA bandwidth. Leo sees PeerDAS as “the root of the entire L2 roadmap”; once sampling is live, he can increase Starknet’s proof frequency without worrying about blob fees. Qi has already written the economic foundation for that world — EthStorage will pay peers to keep sampling blobs available after the protocol forgets about them.

Verkle trees and historical data expiration

Qi sees the two paths as complementary. Verkle trees shrink witness data size and enable stateless clients; historical data expiration reduces disk space for full nodes by half by discarding old blocks. He estimates about 50% storage savings, but only if there is a retrieval market — Portal + EthStorage — to pay someone to store cold data. Leo cares less about savings and more about the power that Verkle trees unlock: a phone that can verify Ethereum without syncing state. He wants to see how the Beacon client handles stateless mode before porting the idea to Starknet.

SSZ Object Transactions (EIP-6404 series)

Qi is leading the first public testnet. The promise: smaller witness data, faster decoding, and perfect alignment with the Verkle tree object hashing model. Derek is agnostic for now ("Roll-up can absorb either format"), and Starknet is just monitoring - Cairo already serializes with its own field element layout.

Contract size 128 KB (EIP-7907)

If you’ve ever had to split a monolith into 24KB pieces, you know the pain. Qi and Curve’s development teams are leading the charge on this patch, but the roadblock isn’t consensus — it’s the need for a DDoS-resistant gas meter for very large deploy transactions.

Block-level access list

Qi's benchmarks show that preloading states in parallel can reduce Geth's IO wait time by about 70%. This in turn justifies raising the gas limit, which directly reduces the cost of publishing blobs. He is collecting mainnet tracking data to prove this tradeoff.

OKX Ventures Insight: Pectra is a “comfort” release; the next twelve months will focus on data availability, stateless verification, and ultimately giving developers space to deploy large, complex contracts without workarounds.

4. The big picture - how will all this expand the moat?

The core metric to watch is the settled value . Leo expects that the compound growth curve of L2 throughput will surpass all other key performance indicators (KPIs). He believes that "each Roll-up will bring its own exponential growth." If this assertion is true, the settlement layer anchored by all these L2s - Ethereum - will capture the entire flywheel effect.

Developer retention is finally looking healthy. The litmus test for Qi is the Web2 team’s trials of AA wallets and subsidized blobs — neither of which existed in a credible form six months ago.

Security budgets are about to be repriced. Derek pointed out that validator integration coupled with a re-mortgage mechanism similar to EigenLayer will shift revenue from idle staking to active validation services. Ether that was once idle in a personal 32 ETH hot wallet is being transformed into remote proof income for oracles, bridges, and DSPs.

Is Pectra the "pivot"? This statement is biased. The panelists agreed that even if Blob utilization is only 40%, large roll-ups will not turn to Celestia or EigenDA. Ethereum's **Data Availability (DA)** is still the most cost-effective trust premium in the crypto space. Continue to expand the base layer, and the delegation market will solve the rest of the problems on its own.

Derek’s core point is: “It’s not a complete pivot, but a doubling down on improving Ethereum’s speed and ensuring the comfort of Roll-ups .”

Qi added: Killer UX upgrades will still be prototyped on L1 first — the 7702 is already doing this, and PeerDAS sampling will follow this path — and then cascade down to L2.

OKX Ventures’ view: The synergy between the highly modular Roll-up stack and the continuously expanding L1 capacity curve constitutes a flywheel that no single chain can match. Pectra did not "save Ethereum"; it just cleared the last user experience gap before PeerDAS increased DA by 25 times.

5. Hot Topic: Is Pectra “Enough”?

DA selection for Roll-ups : Unanimous No — Arbitrum, Starknet, and EthStorage have no plans to move to external DAs, even if blob utilization remains below 60%.

Non-technical leverage : Derek believes that attention should continue to be paid to L1 expansion and Roll-up support ; there is no need to engage in issuance volume games. Qi said: L1 expansion experiments (block-level access lists, larger Gas limits) will originate from Ethereum and propagate back to L2 .

VI. OKX Ventures’ future investment strategy

Smart account infrastructure will become the default consumer entry point. EIP-7702, combined with a third-party payer mechanism, will close the two-year gap between crypto-native contract design and large-scale user onboarding. OKX Ventures prioritizes investments in modular payer liquidity networks , intent relays , and AA risk scoring engines , enabling any Web2 application to provide “stablecoin gas payment” and “one-click registration” features from day one.

Blob native content is the next white space. A storage incentive layer that guarantees retrieval of blobs after protocol expiration is very promising. Cheap blobs plus a storage incentive layer will create a medium where games, AI models, and social media can be built entirely on Ethereum security.

Restaking will absorb the funds saved by validators. EIP-7251 frees up hardware budgets and activates idle ether. Protocols that can transform this collateral into measurable security - such as oracle proofs , bridge validation , shared sorter collections - will gain outsized returns. OKX Ventures expects "investment-grade" restaking targets to become scarce and is actively funding teams with the clearest risk-adjusted accounting.

PeerDAS is the real turning point . When sampling DA is implemented, Roll-up can dilute the marginal DA cost by 10 times without giving up trust in Ethereum. Teams currently building data sampling clients , proof compression circuits , or DA markets will master the core tool layer after Fusaka is activated. OKX Ventures is actively looking for tools, proof compression, and data availability market projects that can preempt Fusaka .