Ethereum Pectra Upgrade: Reshaping Network Ecology and Security Landscape

Ethereum successfully activated the highly anticipated Pectra upgrade on May 7th, marking another important milestone in the network's development following last year's Dencun fork. The upgrade officially took effect at 6:05 AM Eastern Time and completed final confirmation in just 10 minutes.

The upgrade of Pectra to the Ethereum protocol has brought several significant improvements, the most notable of which is the EIP-7702 proposal. This proposal redefines the way external accounts (EOA) interact with smart contracts, enabling regular user wallets to execute contract logic while retaining their original addresses for the first time. This breakthrough lays the foundation for building smarter and more flexible user accounts and is seen as a key step towards achieving comprehensive account abstraction.

In addition, EIP-7251 significantly raises the staking limit for each validator from 32 Ether to 2,048 Ether, allowing large stakers to integrate capital more efficiently, thereby optimizing protocol operation efficiency and improving the reward distribution mechanism. Meanwhile, EIP-7691 increases the number of Blob data blocks per block from 3 to 6, significantly enhancing the data throughput of Layer 2 and effectively reducing the cost of Rollup transactions.

However, the Pectra upgrade has also brought new challenges. Muriel Médard, a professor at MIT and co-founder of Optimum, pointed out that network bandwidth has become a new bottleneck for Ethereum after the upgrade. She emphasized that as the size of Blob data blocks continues to grow, merely increasing the average bandwidth is no longer sufficient; reducing the variability of data propagation is equally crucial. Médard stated: "Unpredictability undermines the overall reliability of Rollups and applications, which has become a core infrastructure issue."

At the same time, security experts have expressed concerns about the far-reaching implications that EIP-7702 may bring. A certain blockchain security company warned that this upgrade breaks the long-standing assumption that "EOA cannot execute contract code." Therefore, smart contracts that rely on old logic such as tx.origin == msg.sender for reentrancy protection or flash loan protection may be exposed to new risks as a result.

Security experts pointed out: "The trust model has changed. EOAs can now execute logic, which introduces new risk vectors for contracts that did not anticipate this feature." They also mentioned that after a similar upgrade was introduced on a certain blockchain in March this year, some suspicious transactions exploiting such hypothetical vulnerabilities have been observed.

To this end, experts strongly recommend that developers update their codebases as soon as possible to avoid continuing to treat EOAs as passive accounts. Instead, industry-standard reentrancy protection measures and more rigorous logical constraints should be adopted to reduce the potential attack surface.

Despite these challenges, the Pectra upgrade is widely regarded in the industry as an important milestone for Ethereum's progression into the next phase of development. It not only redefines the network's infrastructure but also lays a solid foundation for future innovations and expansions. As the ecosystem gradually adapts to these changes, we have reason to expect significant improvements in Ethereum's performance, security, and user experience.