Ethereum developers launched the Pectra upgrade Monday on the Holesky Testnet in order to assess the upgrade’s readiness for production.
Holesky’s testnet was experiencing issues with the finalization of transactions soon after activation. Hildobby noted, as a Dragonfly data analyst, that Holesky had been down for nearly two hours after the upgrade. Hildobby blamed it on “buggy code [causing] an invalid block that most execution clients accepted.”
Erigon, Reth, and Nethermind all worked correctly.
However, developers assessed that the issue is unique to Holesky — a result of a misconfigurating specific to that testnet that wouldn’t occur on Ethereum mainnet. Parithosh Jayanathi, Ethereum Foundation, says that it’s not an issue with the Pectra code per se.
“There are learnings we can take forward, but it isn’t a bug with a wide surface area,” Jayanthi said. “We may take some time to manually verify some things, but the problem seems fully explained.”
This case illustrates the importance of diversity in client base. The heterogeneous ecosystem of clients ensures no one software solution becomes a point of failure in the system, thereby improving Ethereum’s resilience and its decentralization.
Holesky is working to fix the problems. However, Holesky is working to rectify the issues. “recovery is very difficult,” Geth developer Marius van der Wijden said.
“This whole thing will make Ethereum much stronger,” according to van der Wijden. He added, waxing poetic “we will mend the cracks with gold and be better prepared for any eventualities in the future.”
Pectra is aiming to improve layer-2 scaling and introduce account abstraction:
- EIP-7702: A transaction type that allows externally owned accounts (EOAs), to adopt a smart contract-like behaviour by assigning dynamic executable code.
- Pectra’s increased Blob Capacity: Pectra has doubled Ethereum’s capacity for blobs, increasing average blobs in a block from three to six. Blobs are temporary storage space for layer-2 applications, which allows them to more effectively submit transaction data compressed to the mainnet to reduce transaction fees.
- Validator cap increases: Pectra has increased the maximum amount of reward that validators can earn, increasing it from 32 ETH up to 2,048. This change encourages larger stakes and potentially enhances network security and scalability by reducing the total number of validators — currently over 1 million.
Holesky is currently in a critical testing phase. Sepolia’s testnet is next, before the mainnet launch in April.
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