Ethereum is preparing for its Pectra upgrade, which aims to boost the network’s scalability and offer better staking flexibility, by launching a testnet on Monday codenamed Hoodi. This comes after two previous testnets, Holesky and Sepolia, encountered technical issues.
If all goes to plan, it could hit mainnet as early as April 25.
The second largest cryptocurrency’s price appears unmoved by this news. Over the past 24 hours, the Ethereum price has gained only 0.5% and is currently trading at just over $1,900, according to CoinGecko data. Zooming out, ETH has lost 13.3% in the past week amid macro pressures from President Trump’s trade war.
The Pectra uprade will be the third upgrade to the network since The Merge in 2022, which saw Ethereum move from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake. Pectra looks to boost Ethereum’s scalability, efficiency, and staking flexibility as it expands storage capacity for layer-2 networks. It’ll reduce fees, too.
Previous tests of the upgrade faced challenges, most notably Holesky saw an uptick in invalid blocks. As a result, devs are launching Hoodi on Monday, March 17 in hopes it’ll address the issues seen with the last testnet.
Ethereum has become the butt of many jokes across the broader crypto community, with fans of other networks mocking the network for its slow development rate and ETH’s poor price action. Over the past year, according to TradingView, Ethereum has lost 52% of its share of market cap dominance. That’s left room for coins like XRP to gain 258.98%.
But slow and steady wins the race—or so Ethereum maxis would have other investors believe.
Pectra aims to allow users to pay gas fees with multiple tokens, including stablecoins like USDC. It’ll also allow for third-party fee sponsorship, which allows an entity to pay gas fees on behalf of the user—something that has become hugely important on layer-2 scaling networks.
On top of this, Ethereum validators will have a significantly increased capacity for how many tokens they can stake—from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. The uptick will be coupled with more flexibility for when and how the staked Ethereum can be withdrawn.
Pectra will also lay the groundwork for social recovery, which allows users to rely on trusted contacts to help them regain access to a wallet that they’ve forgotten or lost the key to.
With this, many believe that Pectra will be the biggest upgrade to Ethereum since The Merge and one of its largest in its history.
Once Ethereum’s core developers “feel confident” in the state of testing, a mainnet update will be scheduled at least 30 days after the Hoodi fork. This means that the earliest the network could see the Pectra upgrade go live is April 25.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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