Ethereum’s ’Pectra’ Upgrade Goes Live—Now Whales Can Stake 2,048 ETH at a Time

Ethereum just leveled up its staking game. The long-awaited Pectra hard fork is now active, and it’s rolling out the red carpet for deep-pocketed validators.

The headline feature? A massive increase in the maximum effective stake balance—from 32 ETH to a whopping 2,048 ETH. That’s right, the network just handed crypto whales a 64x capacity boost for their staking operations.

While the upgrade promises to streamline large-scale validation, critics are already calling it ’the institutional capture upgrade.’ Because nothing says decentralization like letting a single entity control 64 validator seats worth of stake.

Funny how these ’permissionless’ networks keep bending the rules for those who can afford to play big.

Relief for staking providers

Central to the upgrade is EIP-7251, which increases the maximum amount validators can stake from 32 to 2,048 ETH.

The change is intended to assist staking institutions and infrastructure providers by addressing the needs of validators who stake ETH to keep the chain operational. If you want to invest more than 32 ETH with the network, you must divide your stake among dozens—or sometimes, hundreds—of separate nodes.

This not only consumes time and incurs costs, but it has also resulted in weeks-long lines for new nodes to join the network.

By upping the staking limit, "This means that small operators can compound their stake directly, while large ones can consolidate validators to reduce bandwidth use on the p2p network,” wrote Tim Beiko, the protocol support lead at the Ethereum Foundation, over X.

Account Abstraction

Another CORE component of the hard fork, EIP-7702, would allow crypto wallets to temporarily function as smart contracts. This change brings the Ethereum network closer to account abstraction, a series of features that pave the way for more user-friendly crypto wallets.

Users could, for instance, pay transaction fees in stablecoins instead of ETH, set up an automatic payments system, or introduce recovery access to wallets if they forget their seed phrases.

What else is in Pectra?

While EIP-7251 and EIP-7702 are the main focuses of Pectra, nine other Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) have made it into the package, mostly affecting staking providers, validators, and developers:

• EIP-2537: Introduces a function to the network that makes certain cryptographic operations faster and more efficient, which could benefit privacy tools.
• EIP-2935: Stores more past block information on the blockchain, making it easier to verify that data.
• EIP-6110: Makes the process for new validators to join less complex by handling their staking deposits more directly within the system.
• EIP-7002: Allows validators to initiate withdrawals of their funds directly, improving security and user experience for staking services.
• EIP-7549: Optimizes how the blockchain processes validator votes.
• EIP-7623: Increase the costs of calldata, which is used for data availability (DA).
• EIP-7685: Establishes a standardized way to communicate requests between the execution layer and consensus layer.
• EIP-7691: Increases the blockchain’s capacity to handle more data blobs per block.
• EIP-7840: Introduces a configurable setting for managing how much data Ethereum can handle per block.

Read more: Ethereum Preps for Biggest Code Change Since the Merge With Pectra Upgrade