Report What are the main risks of upgrading Ethereum Pectra
Liquid Collective and Obol report that there are multiple risks associated with the Pectra upgrade planned by Ethereum in early 2025, including key issues related to clients, operational nodes, and cloud diversity.
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Overview of the Pectra Upgrade
Risks of Clients and Operational Nodes
Overview of the Pectra Upgrade
The Pectra upgrade will merge the Prague and Electra upgrades, making significant changes to Ethereum’s execution layer and consensus layer. Expected to launch in the first quarter of 2025, this upgrade will include the Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-7251. The purpose of this proposal is to increase the maximum effective balance to 2048 ETH to integrate staking, thereby reducing the number of required validators and easing the pressure on Ethereum’s communication layer.
Risks of Clients and Operational Nodes
The report focuses on risks related to consensus and execution clients. It warns that significant vulnerabilities in major clients could lead to severe penalties and network instability. As staking is the foundation of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism, relying on a single node operator could expose staked assets to downtime and penalty risks. The report emphasizes the importance of node operator diversity to maintain health and prevent single points of failure.
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Cloud Diversity Issues
The report also emphasizes the necessity of geographic diversity between validators and cloud providers. It cites recent downtime events of major providers like Hetzner and AWS to illustrate the importance of cloud diversity. Decentralized Validator Technology (DVT) is highlighted as a key strategy to enhance validator resilience and reduce associated risks. This is also seen as crucial for institutional adoption.
In fact, these issues have been long discussed in the Ethereum community, with Vitalik
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