12 minutes of nail-biting tension when Ethereum’s Pectra fork goes live

Description

Ethereum developers brace for 12 tense minutes as the massive and troubled Pectra hard fork goes live, hoping to uphold a decade-long streak of flawless upgrades.

Authors

Felix Ng

Publish date

May 6, 2025

Publisher

Cointelegraph

Web URL

https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/12-minutes-of-anxiety-as-ethereums-pectra-hard-fork-goes-live

Referenced by

Pectra has been activated

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News story

Ethereum’s upcoming major hard fork — the Pectra upgrade set for May 7 at 10:05 am UTC — has had an unusually troubled path to mainnet. For the largest hard fork in the blockchain’s history, it’s taken a year and a half to get to this point and failed to finalize properly on the first two testnets. And for the first time in Ethereum’s history, it required a third testnet to be set up in direct response to the issues.

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One epoch is roughly 6.4 minutes, the period of time it takes for a random committee of Ethereum validators to propose and vote on the validity of new blocks. It’s the time taken for up to 32 blocks to be added to the chain. The first two to three epochs are the danger zone where any issues from a new upgrade are likely to rear their ugly heads.

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