The Pectra update of Ethereum on the testnet has failed

The next update of the Ethereum protocol is called Pectra, and these days it is in the test phase.

As often happens during these tests, the outcome was negative. 

The failure of the Pectra upgrade on the Ethereum testnet

Yesterday, the Pectra update of Ethereum was activated on the Holesky testnet.

Unfortunately, however, a problem with the fork configuration affected three majority clients on the network, preventing them from correctly tracking the deposit contract addresses.

However, the minority clients continued to produce valid blocks, highlighting a disparity in client configurations. 

The problem has already been identified, and it turned out to be related to the Execution Layer (EL) clients of Ethereum. The fact is that the correct configuration of the deposit contract addresses was crucial for calculating the hash of the Pectra requests, while the clients affected by the problem forgot to add the correct address, causing discrepancies in monitoring the deposits.

The test therefore has failed. 

The proposed solution

Testnets are used precisely for this purpose, namely to identify problems before they can occur on the mainnet. 

The mainnet is the real Ethereum blockchain, while the testnets are trial copies where everything can go wrong, but at most they are closed without causing consequences. 

In this specific case, the test of the Pectra fork failed on the Holesky testnet, but having already found the solution, it can be retested on other testnets. The tests will be considered passed only when everything has gone smoothly.

The corrections to restore the functionality of the network have already been implemented, therefore the failure of this test served the intended purpose: to discover issues and strengthen the robustness of Ethereum before such issues reach the mainnet.

Ethereum: the fork Pectra

The date on which the Pectra fork will be applied to the Ethereum mainnet has not yet been decided. 

In fact, before deciding to apply it to the mainnet, all tests need to be successfully passed. 

Only when Pectra is operational on all testnets will the developers establish a definitive date to activate the upgrade on the mainnet.

Now therefore, after applying the necessary corrections for the problem that occurred on the Holesky testnet, it will be necessary to conduct further tests with the corrected version on other testnets, until a completely positive outcome is achieved. 

The next testnet on which it will be tested will be Sepolia. The test should be initiated on March 5, but the developers might also decide to delay it due to the issue that just occurred on Holesky.

In the past, it has already been done this way countless times, and in the end, everything always went well precisely because the inevitable problems were discovered before the implementation on the mainnet.

What does the Pectra update change?

The fork Pectra will introduce several new system contract configurations. 

One of the key changes, EIP-6110, will shift the responsibilities of deposit detection from the Consensus Layer (CL) to the Execution Layer (EL). 

However, the update overall combines 11 main updates into a single package. 

At the center of this package is EIP-7702, a modification that aims to improve the user experience of crypto wallets.

It was proposed directly by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, and it will allow wallets to have some smart contract capabilities. It is part of a broader strategy aimed at the abstraction of Ethereum accounts, and thus at making the usability of wallets much less cumbersome.

Pectra also includes EIP-7251, a modification that will allow validators to increase the maximum amount of ETH they can stake, raising it from the current 32 to as much as 2,048 ETH. 

In theory, Pectra should have been the largest update in the entire history of Ethereum, but it was later decided to split the original package into two because it was considered too ambitious. 

The updates of Ethereum

The updates on Ethereum are applied with forks. 

This means that if some clients did not agree with the application of the updates, they could also create a new chain, as happened for example with Ethereum PoW in September 2022, when some nodes refused the transition to PoS (Proof-of-Stake). 

However, the most famous fork of all is the one from 2016, from which the current Ethereum network was born, starting from the one still existing today with the name Ethereum Classic (ETC). 

Due to some technical problems, a colossal theft occurred. The community decided to remove from the blockchain the blocks following the one prior to the theft, in order to restore everything to the previous situation. 

However, some nodes rejected this decision, therefore the original chain continued maintaining the blocks of the theft and the subsequent ones, while thanks to a fork a new chain was born that annulled all the transactions present in the block of the theft and in the subsequent ones. 

The original unmodified chain, however, became the minority one and ended up changing its name to Ethereum Classic. The forked (and modified) one, on the other hand, became the main one and retained the name Ethereum.