Pectra Update Stumbles—What’s Next for Ethereum’s Testnet?

Exactly at 21:55 UTC on Monday, Ethereum’s latest upgrade entered its first real trial by fire—a high-stakes stress test before any potential deployment on the mainnet.

Holesky, one of Ethereum’s key testnets, is built to replicate real-world blockchain dynamics. It’s the last line of defense, allowing developers to catch and fix flaws before updates roll out to millions of users. Testing here isn’t just routine—it’s the difference between a smooth launch and a major disruption.

With Pectra, Ethereum is set to implement 11 major Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), each designed to push the network’s evolution forward. Among them, EIP-7702 enhances cryptocurrency wallets by incorporating smart contract capabilities and introducing account abstraction, making transactions smoother and wallets more adaptable.

Another game-changing update is EIP-7251, which raises the validator staking limit from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH—paving the way for more scalable and efficient node deployment. Additionally, EIP-7691 increases the number of blobs, reinforcing the scalability of Layer 2 rollups and reducing network congestion.

A cornerstone of Ethereum’s blockchain security is finality—the assurance that once a transaction is confirmed, it cannot be reversed. This occurs after two epochs (approximately 13 minutes) when a majority of validators reach consensus, locking the transaction permanently into the blockchain. 

The Pectra test update has encountered a serious challenge: since activation on Holesky, no blocks have achieved finality, a sign that execution clients might not be functioning as expected. Paradigm’s CTO, Georgios Konstantopoulos, shared his take on X.

Holesky and other testnets exist to find issues. Excited that Reth & Erigon worked well, and IMO NBD for other teams. Shit happens. We fix and keep shipping as one team. Highly recommend Reth in prod. Would it have been better had no client had a bug? Sure. Was the bug easy to find? Yes. Does it mean we should go slower? No,

noted Georgios Konstantopoulos.

Next up is the March 5 activation on Sepolia, but unresolved finalization issues on Holesky could derail the timeline. Ethereum’s core developers will only move forward with the April mainnet release if both test deployments pass without critical setbacks.