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