Assessing Pectra’s impact on Ethereum staking and Layer-2 scalability

Author Tanay Ved at Coin Metrics

Since going live on May 7, Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade has delivered meaningful structural improvements, most notably through EIP-7251, which raised the validator max effective balance from 32 to 2,048 ETH, and EIP-7691, which doubled blob space to better support Layer-2 scaling. In the weeks following the upgrade, more than 11,000 validators have consolidated, shrinking the active validator set by approximately 16,000 while keeping total staked ETH stable and increasing the average stake per validator to around 32.4 ETH. Blob activity has risen, with the number of blobs posted to Ethereum growing from about 21,000 to 28,000, although rollup usage still trails the new target capacity of six blobs per block. As blobspace costs have dropped, Layer-2 transaction volumes have climbed, driven by cheaper execution. However, total blob fees remain close to zero, indicating that further fee increases—and full utilization of blobspace—will depend on higher data demand from rollups.

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