Ethereum's Pectra upgrade released today

According to an official statement from the Ethereum Foundation published today, May 7, Pectra has officially launched. The Pectra upgrade is the largest fork since The Merge, which changed the Ethereum blockchain from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Pectra represents a package of 11 core code changes

Speaking this morning on the official livestream in honor of the upgrade, active community leader Pooja Ranjan noted that Pectra is Ethereum's 19th upgrade since 2015. It is also the third upgrade since the Merge in 2022, following last year's smaller Dencun upgrade that introduced blobs

Pectra is a blend of Prague and Electra, two upgrades happening simultaneously on the execution and consensus layers. EIP-7702 introduces "account abstraction." This will allow the addition of permission for sponsored transactions, in which a third party, such as a dApp, can pay the user's fees

Updated wallets will implement passkey-based authentication and transaction bundling (similar to Solana), eliminating the need for manual token approvals before swapping them or depositing into a dApp

The upgrade will also make it possible to limit the number of tokens a particular application can spend, or to cap daily outflows from a wallet

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