Ethereum Developers to Launch Hoodi Testnet, Mainnet Pectra Upgrade Expected to Initiate by Late April

According to a report by The Block, developers from the Ethereum Foundation confirmed during a developer meeting held on Thursday that a new testnet named “Hoodi” will be launched on March 17, aimed at testing the deployment of the Pectra upgrade before its official launch on the mainnet.

Prior to this, the deployment of the Pectra upgrade on Holesky and Sepolia (two major testnets of Ethereum) encountered issues, with Holesky losing its “finality” due to misconfiguration. Subsequently, developers decided to conduct additional tests and discuss whether to create a “shadow fork” of the Holesky testnet to ensure a smooth deployment of the subsequent mainnet upgrade. Although finality was restored on the testnet on Monday, it has not yet reached a fully usable state for all research purposes.

Reports indicate that Pectra may be launched on the Ethereum mainnet as early as April 25, approximately 30 days after the upgrade is deployed to the new Hoodi testnet. The Ethereum Foundation plans to invest significant resources into this new network and operate a “similar number of validation nodes” as those on the mainnet.

According to the minutes of Thursday’s meeting, the Hoodi testnet will specifically allow researchers to test the validator exit functionality, as there have been congestion issues in the validator exit queue on Holesky. The subsequent Holesky and Sepolia will continue to be used for other research purposes.

Improvements Brought by Pectra

The name of the “Pectra” upgrade combines the execution layer’s “Prague” upgrade and the consensus layer’s “Electra” upgrade, aimed at improving the experience for users and network operators. One of the main improvement proposals is EIP-7702, which will grant cryptocurrency wallets certain smart contract functionalities. The purpose of this change is to further advance Ethereum towards account abstraction, a technology that allows wallet developers to add user-friendly features, such as using tokens other than Ether (ETH) to pay transaction fees.

Another key proposal, EIP-7251, will alleviate some of the concerns of Ethereum validators. This change will increase the maximum staking limit for individual validators from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, meaning that those wishing to stake more than 32 ETH will no longer need to spread their assets across so many nodes, enhancing the convenience for validators and reducing the startup time for new nodes.