On April 15, 2026, the Ethereum mainnet successfully completed the Pectra upgrade.
The ordinary ETH address in your wallet can "transform" into a smart contract starting today—no migration, no hassle.
1. EIP-7702
For the past decade, the Ethereum account system has existed as two parallel lines: ordinary accounts (EOA) and smart contract accounts. The former is simple but has limited functionality, while the latter is powerful but has a high threshold. Do users want to use advanced features like social recovery, batch transactions, and Gas payment? They need to redeploy a smart contract wallet and migrate assets, facing various compatibility pitfalls along the way.
The cleverness of EIP-7702 lies in that it allows EOA addresses to temporarily "mount" smart contract code during a single transaction. When the transaction ends, the code is automatically unloaded, and the account returns to its original state. It sounds complicated, but it's actually very simple for users: when you authorize a transaction with MetaMask, the wallet automatically completes three tasks for you—batch approval, swap, and transfer, with gas fees covered by the DApp project.
New users no longer need to buy ETH as gas fees first; they don't need to understand what authorization or slippage is. One wallet address manages all interactions. The initial setup cost alone can save about $0.06, and in batch trading scenarios, gas costs can be reduced by 40%-50%.
2. Ethereum's "Ten-Lane Highway"
If Pectra addresses the issue of "usability", the subsequent Glamsterdam upgrade addresses the issue of "speed".
Currently, Ethereum resembles a single-lane road: all transactions are queued for serial processing, and the next one can only wait until the previous one is completed. EIP-7928 introduces a "block-level access list" that allows the system to know in advance which states each transaction will read and write. Transactions without conflicts? They can be executed in parallel across different CPU cores.
With the gas limit raised from 60 million to 200 million, the theoretical TPS is approaching the tens of thousands from the current approximately 1000. More critically, the repricing of gas fees—charging based on the actual consumption of CPU, storage, and bandwidth—may reduce overall gas fees by about 78.6%. A Uniswap transaction that currently costs $3-8 is expected to drop below $1 after the upgrade.
The experience gap between Ethereum mainnet and high-performance public chains like Solana is rapidly narrowing. The L2 ecosystem currently has a throughput of over 3700 operations per second, but when the mainnet itself runs at tens of thousands of TPS and gas fees drop below $1, will the positioning of L2 be redefined?
3. ePBS: Locking the power of MEV into the protocol
MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) has always been a hidden pain point in the DeFi ecosystem. Arbitrageurs rush, sandwich attacks, and these profits are mostly divided among miners/validators and professional MEV extractors. Ordinary users? They can only passively accept slippage losses.
The embedded ePBS (EIP-7732) writes the block building logic directly into the protocol layer, and validators no longer rely on external relays. The extraction of MEV is expected to decrease by about 70%, and this portion of the "saved value" will be redistributed in a fairer manner.
For validators, the revenue structure will change, but it will be more predictable. For DeFi users, the certainty of transaction execution is greatly improved—what you see as a quote when placing an order will no longer be "snatched" by front-runners at the time of execution.
