Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade Still on Schedule After Test Failure: ‘People Are Watching’

Ethereum’s core developers decided Thursday to proceed on schedule with the network’s highly anticipated Pectra upgrade, even after a testnet deployed to serve as a practice run for the update failed to finalize earlier this week.

On Monday, Ethereum’s developers initiated the Holesky testnet, an effective dress rehearsal of the Pectra upgrade that wouldn’t impact the network’s mainnet. In a somewhat rare occurrence for Ethereum, the testnet failed to finalize. Days later, the mock upgrade still hasn’t been successfully implemented. 

During a developer meeting this morning, Ethereum’s leadership acknowledged that the problem posed by the incident was serious—but also highly manageable, and not cause for alarm.

“Even though this Holesky issue has evolved quite badly, the trigger incident on the execution side was quite trivial and easily patched,” the Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko said during Thursday’s meeting.

The group then opted to stay on-track and run Pectra’s next testnet, Sepolia, on March 5—its originally scheduled date. Assuming Sepolia goes according to plan, then Pectra should land sometime in early April. 

While Ethereum’s developers expressed confidence that the issue they identified to have derailed Holesky was minor and isolated, members of the elite group also appeared to concede that the incident has created a public relations issue. 

“People are watching,” said Jim McDonald, co-founder of Ethereum staking service Attestant.

McDonald implored his colleagues to manually cross-check all code related to the upcoming Sepolia fork and publish their work to reassure the public. 

“Just so everyone can gain a level of comfort that the problem we saw on Holesky will absolutely, definitely not happen on Sepolia,” he said. 

When it ultimately goes live, Pectra will bring several long-desired, user-friendly features to Ethereum. Perhaps most notably, it will grant smart contract functionality to the types of basic crypto wallets issued by mainstream companies like MetaMask and Coinbase.

The move will allow users on the network to pay for gas fees with any crypto token of their choosing, including stablecoins. It is also anticipated to make user experience on consumer-facing crypto apps far more seamless and intuitive.

Pectra will additionally permit independent Ethereum stakers to earn rewards on sums greater than 32 ETH for the first time, and significantly reduce the bandwidth required to run staking pools like Lido and Rocket Pool.

Edited by Andrew Hayward