Pectra upgrade on Ethereum mainnet is coming this May after bugs get fixed

Ethereum’s next big update, called Pectra, is now scheduled to go live on May 7.

Scheduling decision, finalized during the All Core Developers Consensus (ACDC) call #154 on April 3, 2025.

It’s one of the most important changes to Ethereum since it switched to proof-of-stake back in 2022.

The upgrade was originally planned for March 2025, but it hit some problems during testing.

A major issue on the Holesky testnet delayed things, though developers managed to fix it.

They created a new testnet called Hoodi, which has been running smoothly.

There was also a small problem on the Sepolia testnet in March, but that got sorted out too. On March 10, Holesky finally worked as expected.

Ethereum developers use testnets—basically test versions of the network to catch issues before launching changes on the real network (called the mainnet).

After everything was stable, developers agreed on the new mainnet launch date during a Thursday call.

Here’s what Pectra will bring:

• Scalability improvements to help the network handle more traffic.
• A big change to validator staking: currently, validators can only stake 32 ETH, but after the upgrade, they’ll be able to stake up to 2,048 ETH.
• Account abstraction, which lets users pay transaction fees with different tokens—not just ETH. That means you could use stablecoins, for example.
• Better wallet features, including social recovery, which would make it easier for users to recover lost wallet access without needing their original seed phrase.

Pectra is a major step forward for Ethereum, and it’s finally ready to roll out on May 7.