Ethereum developers are currently debating the Pectra upgrade, which is set to improve various aspects of the blockchain’s functionality.
Tim Beiko, the Ethereum Foundation’s protocol support lead, confirmed the development, announcing that the developers have reached an agreement to include Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) 3074 in the network’s upcoming overhaul.
EIP 3074 is a significant advancement within Ethereum’s ecosystem and was introduced by Lightclients in 2020. The proposal has received widespread support from the crypto community as it aims to enhance the user experience (UX) of Ethereum wallets.
Essentially, EIP 3074 allows conventional crypto wallets like MetaMask to operate similarly to smart contracts.
This upgrade enables various functionalities, including transaction bundling, simplifying the signing process to a single step, and sponsored transactions. The latter feature allows wallets to delegate funds for others to use, providing a more flexible and efficient transaction framework.
Trading a new token on a DEX such as Uniswap will now only require one signature from a user’s wallet rather than having to approve the new token and then sign the transaction to purchase.
The announcement of the impending upgrade has elicited various reactions within the crypto community.
Georgios Konstantopoulous, Paradigm’s CTO, highlighted the update’s potential to enhance wallet usability tenfold, noting Reth’s successful implementation and testing.
Echoing this sentiment, Hayden Adams, the creator of Uniswap, praised the upgrade as a significant improvement to Ethereum’s user experience. He added:
“Industry should make an effort to create compatibility for 4337 wallets to interact with 3074 contracts (much like eip1271 has created compatibility between safes and EOAs today).”
However, EVM developer Alex Watts cautioned against solely focusing on user experience improvements, emphasizing the broader implications for application and mechanism design.
Despite the optimism, some community members have lingering concerns about the EIP 3074 upgrade.
Ansgar Dietrich, an Ethereum Researcher involved in the proposal’s inception, expressed ambivalence, reflecting on the lengthy journey to its impending mainnet integration and questioning its alignment with the evolving account abstraction roadmap.
Similarly, 0xngmi, the pseudonymous developer of DeFiLlama, raised apprehensions about the upgrade potentially enabling the complete depletion of addresses, including tokens, NFTs, and other DeFi assets.
