TechFlow reports on March 5 that the upcoming Ethereum Pectra upgrade successfully activated today at 2:30 a.m. Eastern Time on the Sepolia testnet. Sepolia represents the final major testing phase before deployment on the mainnet, which is expected to go live next month.
This deployment marks the second phase of Pectra's testnet activation, following its earlier rollout on the Holesky testnet on February 24. Although the Holesky test experienced an issue where an incorrect deposit contract address in execution clients caused a chain split, developers quickly resolved the problem and stabilized the network.
The Pectra upgrade—comprising the "Prague" execution layer update and the "Electra" consensus layer update—introduces several improvements, including enhanced wallet user experience and account abstraction via EIP-7702, increasing the validator staking cap from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH via EIP-7251, and boosting scalability performance by raising the maximum number of data blobs per block via EIP-7691.
