Ethereum developers agreed on Thursday to split their upcoming hard fork, Pectra, into two packages, in a move to make the massive upgrade less unwieldy and reduce the risk of missteps or bugs.

The decision to split up the upgrade wasn't unexpected. Developers had discussed previously that Pectra was becoming too ambitious to ship all at once, floating the idea of splitting it up in order to minimize the risk of finding bugs in the code.

Pectra was on track to be Ethereum’s biggest hard fork to date. (A hard fork is the technical term for when a blockchain splits from its original, and is the method used by Ethereum to implement major software upgrades.) Now, developers will be able to focus on a much narrower scope. Previously, developers shared they would aim to have the upgrade live in early 2025; that is still the case for the first part of the Pectra package.

Ethereum All Core Developers Consensus Layer Call 142 (Margaux Nijkerk/CoinDesk)

The core developers decided that eight Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) will be included in the first package, which includes EIP-7702, aimed at improving the user-experience of wallets, and famously scribbled by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 22 minutes.

The second package is up to be changed over the next few months, but as of now could include proposals that aim to make changes to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, known as EOF, along with introducing a feature called PeerDAS, which improves data availability sampling and ultimately is beneficial for layer-2 blockchains.

The developers acknowledged that the scopes of these upgrades can change over time, so solidifying this upgrade wouldn't be wise in this moment.

"There seems to be agreements to split current Pectra somehow," said Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes, who led the call. "And then downstream, we can figure out what comes next."

“I hear everyone that, it can be tricky to not want to put new things in. I would lean towards, again, keeping the scope very small, just because then that's going to maximize our chances of actually shipping the second fork very quickly with respect to this first one,” Stokes added.

Pectra Ethereum hard fork ETH Ether Upgrade Upgrades

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.