Following the Conclusion of the 206th ACDE Call

Following the conclusion of the 206th All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) calls on February 27, new updates regarding Ethereum Pectra have been released.

Galaxy researcher Christine Kim took to X to share three crucial takeaways on the upgrade, which combines the Prague and Electra updates.

Three Takeaways From Ethereum’s #206 ACDE Call

After going live on the Holesky testnet on February 24, 2025, Pectra is scheduled to launch on the Sepolia testnet by March 5, during epoch 222464.

The successful upgrade of both testnets will lead to a mainnet activation epoch. This decision comes after the Pectra Upgrade was unable to settle on the Holesky testnet. Although rare, developers have been working on mitigation routes for Holesky.

Kim noted that no changes have been made to the scheduled date for the Sepolia fork. Ethereum developers are still moving forward with the upgrade by next Wednesday.

Source: X

Updates on four clients—Geth, Besu, Nethermind, and Lodestar—will be released in the coming days.

Kim emphasized that developers have not abandoned Holesky, as they continue to invest resources into its recovery. A meeting has been scheduled to discuss coordinating how slashing protections across all Holesky validators will be disabled.

Regardless of the decisions made, Holesky is expected to take a few weeks to fully recover, according to Kim.

One inconvenience caused by Holesky’s failure is the loss of specific testing capabilities; hence, Ethereum developers are working towards creating testing paths similar to Holesky. They are also implementing long-term mitigation and recovery tools to prevent a recurrence of the issues faced by Holesky.

Ethereum Pectra and its Relevance

The Pectra upgrade follows last year’s Dencun upgrade. This upgrade includes features designed to enhance Ethereum accounts, improve the validator experience, and support Layer-2 scaling among various operations.

Notably, Pectra is supported by several Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including EIP-3074, which introduces an innovative “social recovery” function to address the issue of lost private keys for Ethereum users.

EIP-3074 aims to unlock the potential of simple ether wallets, known as Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs), by providing them with a wide range of smart contract capabilities. With EIP-3074 and others, the Pectra upgrade aims to optimize both the execution and consensus layers of Ethereum.

Future Expectations

Recently, the broader Ethereum ecosystem has faced challenges, particularly after Bybit was impacted by a $1.4 billion attack.

Recent updates indicate that bad actors targeted the cryptocurrency exchange via SAFE servers, leading to the transfer of $1.4 billion in ETH.

Bybit’s reserves plummeted from 443,691 ETH prior to the hack to just 39,692 ETH within an hour.

However, improvements have been noted as Bybit has worked to close the gap created by the hack through a series of asset purchases, loans, and whale deposits, totaling 446,870 ETH.

Additionally, the trading platform confirmed the return of some of its loans, including 40,000 ETH to Bitget exchange.