At yesterday’s Ethereum ACDE meeting, Ethereum core developers discussed the upcoming Pectra upgrade, including confirming the inclusion of EIP-7702 and EOF (EVM Object Format). The former is an account abstraction proposal proposed by Vitalik Buterin; the latter is an EVM upgrade proposal covering 11 EIPs aimed at improving the scalability and security of EVM.
In the next major update of Ethereum, the “Pectra upgrade” will incorporate EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), with a focus on EOF (EVM Object Format) and Vitalik Buterin’s proposed account abstraction EIP-7702.
During this meeting, participants agreed to implement EOF and EIP-7702 in the Pectra upgrade, but EOF will not be included in the devnet-1 test network. Tim Beiko stated:
EOF is an upgrade proposal for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) aimed at improving the scalability and security of EVM. It is understood that the EOF upgrade covers 11 EIPs, addressing inefficiencies, high execution costs, and security issues in the current EVM design, and will enhance the EVM code of Ethereum Layer 1 and Layer 2. The upgrade was initially planned to be implemented in the Shanghai upgrade but was later removed.
EIP-7702 is Vitalik Buterin’s proposal to replace “EIP-3074” with an account abstraction proposal. It introduces a new transaction type that allows externally owned accounts (EOAs) to temporarily adopt the characteristics of smart contracts during transactions and then revert to their original state after the transaction ends. This new transaction type can enhance account abstraction functionality, avoid security issues in EIP-3074, and achieve all use cases of EIP-3074 without the need for a hard fork.
Discussions during the meeting highlighted potential issues with EIP-7702 due to nonce/balance/codehash being zero when creating an account, so this proposal still needs refinement and testing, and if there are no issues, it will be implemented in the Verkle fork.
In the previous ACDE meeting, Ethereum core developers decided to release the Pectra upgrade in the first quarter of 2025.
Additionally, the Pectra upgrade will also include EIP-7251 (or “Increase Maximum Effective Balance” proposal), which will increase the staking limit of each validator from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. This proposal is expected to significantly reduce the number of validators, thereby reducing the operational burden on operators.