The highly anticipated upgrade of Ethereum, known as Pectra, was recently deployed on the Holesky testnet on February 24th.
Nevertheless, it ran into complications concerning finalization, where consensus among all nodes is necessary to ensure the immutability of produced blocks.
ETH developers familiar with the situation pointed out that the issue stemmed from a misconfiguration in major execution clients like Geth, Nethermind, ETHjs, and Besu.
Georgios Konstantopoulos, the Chief Technology Officer at Paradigm and a member of the upgrade team, identified a bug related to the deposit Contact Address (CA) for the Pectra upgrade.
Understanding the Pectra Upgrade
As of the latest data from Dora Explorer, finality issues persist. Nevertheless, developers have assured that these challenges will be addressed following updates on other execution clients.
For those unfamiliar, the Pectra upgrade is designed to introduce eleven enhancements focusing on user experience, blob scaling, and smart wallet functionality. These improvements are intended to bolster Ethereum’s scalability and competitive edge against competitors like Solana (SOL).
The original plan was to activate the Pectra upgrade on the Holesky testnet on February 24th, then on Sepolia on March 5th, before releasing it on the mainnet.
However, due to the complications during the Holesky activation, the timeline for the upgrades has now become uncertain.
Notably, significant players showed increased interest in ETH last year, signaling optimism for the altcoin, as highlighted by CryptoQuant’s founder, Ki Young Ju.
“Balances in 10K-100K ETH addresses grew by 24% in a year, primarily driven by inflows from wallets holding less than 1K ETH.”
Meanwhile, ETH retraced to above $2000, reaching its lows for 2024 on the price charts.
This price range halted the liquidation trend observed in early February and could potentially trigger a rebound if it holds steady.