It's only been six months since Ethereum, the dominant smart-contract blockchain, had its last major upgrade. But there are so many developer priorities for what to tackle next that there's a growing realization they can't all happen at once.

So now, Ethereum developers are considering dividing the highly anticipated Pectra upgrade into two parts.

Pectra was on track to be Ethereum’s biggest hard fork to date. (A hard fork, in this case, is the technical blockchain term for the software upgrade.), But some developers argue that the entire package of new features has become unwieldy, and they have expressed a desire to split it due to its complexities, and the risk of doing too much, too fast.

During an All Core Developers call last week, Ethereum developers started to play with the idea that splitting the hard fork into two might be feasible.

EF DevOps Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi, who was one of the core developers pushing to split Pectra, told CoinDesk over Telegram that “we’re talking about splitting it into two forks, mainly to reduce the risk of a bug and to enable faster shipping of both forks.”

According to a report by Christine Kim, vice president of research at Galaxy Digital, the first part of Pectra would include Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) including EIP-7702, which aims to improve wallets – famously scribbled by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 22 minutes. The second part would see EIPs aimed at upgrading Ethereum’s Virtual Machine, known as EOF.

On Thursday, Ethereum developers will decide in their upcoming All Core Developers Consensus layer call if Pectra will be split into two forks.

Possible downside

If developers agree on the split, the first package could come in 2025, as early as February.

Ethereum developers haven’t disagreed much with the potential of splitting the fork, though EF researcher Ansgar Dietrichs toldCoinDesk that one downside would be pushing EIP-7594, or PeerDAS, to the second package. PeerDAS aims to improve data availability on Ethereum, and with the delay in the feature going live, there might be slightly higher fees for layer-2 blockchains for the time being.

“PeerDAS is crucial to make sure L2s have more room for future throughput growth, so the sooner we ship it, the more certain we can be that we can support whatever throughput L2s might need over the next year,” Dietrichs told CoinDesk. “For now, we still have some room to go even before PeerDAS. So hopefully it won’t matter at all. Worst case, L2s will have slightly higher fees again for a few months while we wait for the second half of the Pectra fork.”

Dietrichs said that, "Ultimately, I think a split is likely still the right decision.”

“I think everyone agrees that it's a really big fork, so a natural thing to do is just to break it into two,” said EF Researcher Alex Stokes on last week’s call, according to Kim’s report. “Generally, smaller forks are less risky.”

Ethereum ETH Upgrade Upgrades hard fork

Margaux Nijkerk

Margaux Nijkerk reports on the Ethereum protocol and L2s. A graduate of Johns Hopkins and Emory universities, she has a masters in International Affairs & Economics. She holds a small amount of ETH and other altcoins.