By Norah ODonnell
Based on a new report by Liquid Collective and Obol, Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade in 2025 poses considerable risks, including concerns over operator, client, and cloud diversity.
As Ethereum prepares for the Pectra upgrade in early 2025, a recent research report unleashed by Liquid Collective and Obol has highlighted many associated risks.
This report highlighted the benefits of client, operator, and cloud diversity coupled with various concerns about the limited adoption of distributed validator technology (DVT).
While speaking to reporters, the Alluvial chief product officer Matt Leisinger, a software development firm that supports Liquid Collective, stated:
“Our latest report with Obol highlights the growing importance of addressing Ethereum staking’s correlated risks and protocol-level penalties.”
Client And Operator Risks
Looking at consensus and execution clients, this report warned that “a significant bug in a dominant client” could result in huge slashing networks and network instability.
As a fundamental element of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism, taking via one node operator can expose the staked assets to downtime and multiple slashing risks.
On staking, this report vehemently warned that operator diversity is important for the maintenance of network health and avoiding single points of failure. Leisinger reinforced the statement in the report, explaining:
“Every staker and service provider must rigorously assess correlation, diversity, and risk mitigation to prevent potential risks, even from trusted node operators.”
Cloud Diversity Concerns
This report also extensively discussed the importance of a wide geographical spread of validators and cloud providers, citing “recent outages, such as those at Hetzner and AWS.”
It mentioned that DVT can considerably support the strategy, boosting validator resilience by minimizing all the correlated risks.
Leisinger added:
“For long-term resilience and institutional adoption, it’s critical that staking configurations prioritize node operator and validator diversity.”
The Pectra Upgrade
The forthcoming Ethereum Pectra upgrade integrates the Prague and Electra upgrades, mainly focusing on alterations to network execution and consensus layers, respectively.
Pectra is expected to go live in the first quarter of 2025 and feature the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-7251.
Based on the report:
“The Pectra upgrade will allow staking providers to consolidate their stake into fewer validators by raising the maximum effective balance to 2,048 ETH.”
The change in the staking limit will minimize the number of validators needed to minimize the pressure on Ethereum’s communication layer.
On that note, the dual upgrade unleashes several Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) created to optimize multiple aspects of the blockchain. Notable features include EIP-3074, which boosts wallet functionality by supporting batch transactions, and EIP-7251, which boosts the staking limit for the validators from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH.
Also, Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) enhances roll-up scalability, and the EVM Object Format (EOF) boosts smart contract security. Diving deeper into the forthcoming dual upgrade’s key features, let us see how these boosts are set to revolutionize Ethereum’s scalability and performance.
PeerDAS (EIP-7594) is an integral component of the Ethereum Pectra upgrade, striving to considerably boost roll-up scalability. By enhancing layer 2 solutions like Arbitrum and Base, PeerDAS enhances the efficiency of transaction processing. The upgrade addresses the increasing demand for scalable solutions within the Ethereum network.
The primary objective of PeerDAS is to boost the performance of layer 2 (L2) solutions, increasing the efficiency of handling more transaction volumes. It achieves that by enhancing the data availability sampling process, which is important for roll-ups.
As a result, PeerDAS will considerably enhance the scalability and efficiency of roll-ups, resulting in quicker transaction processing and minimized resource usage on the Ethereum network. That makes Ethereum more robust and capable of supporting a larger user base.
The Takeaway
The Ethereum Pectra upgrade marks a considerable increase in Ethereum improvements, boosting performance, scalability, and security. This pivotal update will benefit users and investors greatly.