Key Insights:
Ethereum might see Pectra Upgrade's mainnet deployment in the second half of April 2025.
The mainnet deployment ususally takes place after 30 days of the last successful testnet deployment.
After the Sepolia testnet went successful, the Holesky testnet brought up some issues, delaying the mainnet deployment.
Ethereum Developers meeting on 6 March 2025 finalized that there would be one more testnet deployment before the mainnet sees the Pectra Upgrade.
The Pectra Upgrade is expected to arrive between 16 and 30 April 2025 after the Ethereum Developer meeting on 6 March decided to go for an extra testnet deployment (on Hoodi).
The last testnet deployment took place on the Holesky network which brought some issues in front of the Ethereum Developers. Therefore, another testnet followed by some internal adjustments became necessary, pushing the Mainnet deployment ahead in time.
Prior to that, Sepolia also saw Pectra Upgrades and these were successful.
The mainnet deployment on Ethereum usually takes 30 days after the last successful testnet deployment. Since the Hoodi deployment is supposed to happen today, the mainnet deployment might have to wait till the latter part of April 2025.
This is the same schedule we saw during Dencun Upgrade deployment which finally saw thye light of the day on 13 March 2024.
The stake amount of 32 ETH has been posing a trouble since only large retail investors or whales would be able to post this huge amount as stake. Vitalik wanted to reduce this stake to 1 ETH for increasing the number of validators, further decentralizing Ethereum.
At present, Ethereum has around 1 million validators.
This is the most critical issue in front of Ethereum developers. Several users complained that the Etheruem Blob Fees has been volatile, dropping and rising in a sudden bouts and have therefore become unpredictable.
Blob Fee Volatility in ETH
Dune
Ethereum's vision of aligning all its Layer-2s have seen a hurdle because of the Blob issue. The Pectra Upgrade is expected to solve this by setting the ground for Sharding and helping ETH move away from Danksharding.
There are several outcomes of the upgrade which could turn the favor of the crypto markets towards Ethereum.
The Dencun Upgrade only temporarily solved the scaling crisis by posting data on blobs. The newer Pectra Upgrade would move towards sharding, which is the process of distributing the entire Ethereum blockchain in multiple shards, each capable of processing transactions independently. Since multiple sharding would be working parallelly, Ethereum is expected to be as much times faster as the number of shards.
The upgrade is supposed to solve the issue of inflation, blob fee volatility and raise the security, therefore making ETH highly attractive than its current form.
In the current markets, Ethereum has been facing some abandonment issues, which have caused its token price to sink below $2000 levels in the first week of March 2025. However, after the US Fed Meeting, it recovered above $2000.
Ethereum Surges Above $2000
CoinMarketCap
Greater decentralization would not only increase the number of validators but also distribute them across different geographies in a much better way, ensuring a more evenly distribution. Further, it will also decrease the validators' preference of relying on centralized cloud infrastructure and would encourage the use of DePIN, making it more failure resistant.
After the Dencun Upgrade, the Ethereum tokenomics became slightly inflationary because there was a shortage in fee revenue to pay validators. Ethereum had to see a price decline because of this surge in new tokens. However, by the end of 2024, this fee revenue had covered up.
Ethereum grossed total fee revenue at $2.5 billion for 2025.
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