Ether Boulevard is tense! Development community: accelerating deployment of new hard forks, Pectra upgrade estimated to go live on 4/8

Recently, under significant community pressure, Ethereum announced at the Core Developers' meeting on the 13th that it will expedite the deployment of future Ethereum protocol upgrades in an attempt to address recent community calls for accelerated improvements and criticisms. (Background: Ethereum Pectra upgrade coming in March, Vitalik: Doubling Layer 2 capacity! Gas Limit increasing for the first time in the PoS era) (Context: Summary of key points from the 203rd Ethereum ACDE meeting: What impact will the Pectra upgrade bring?) Ethereum has been underperforming in terms of price during this Bull Market cycle, with core developers abruptly leaving and continuous dumping by the Ethereum Foundation (EF), leading to community dissatisfaction. This has prompted Ethereum co-founder Vitalik to announce a major reform of the Ethereum Foundation's leadership. Under mounting community pressure, the Ethereum Foundation announced at the Core Developers (ACDE) meeting on February 13th that it will expedite the deployment of future Ethereum protocol upgrades. Nixo Rokish, a member of the Ethereum Foundation protocol support team, tweeted on the 13th, "The posts in the Pectra Retrospective forum have reached a strong Consensus, indicating that people want to speed up the fork pace. This means less hesitation in scope and more proactive opinions." The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to go live in April. According to Christine Kim, Vice President of Galaxy Research, and EtherWorld conference records, the Pectra upgrade is currently in its final testing phase. Developers expect that if the public test network upgrade goes smoothly this week, the Pectra upgrade is scheduled to launch on the Ethereum Mainnet around April 8th. Developers also confirmed the timeline for the Ethereum public test network upgrade at the meeting, with the team planning to activate the Pectra fork on the Holesky and Sepolia test networks on February 24th and March 5th, respectively. If there are no major issues during the test network upgrade, the Pectra Mainnet fork is expected to take place approximately 30 days after the Sepolia fork. Cointelegraph notes that the Pectra upgrade may be the largest upgrade in Ethereum's history, incorporating up to 20 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including proposals to double the data availability blobs (from 3 to 6) to enhance user experience (UX), as well as a capacity increase proposal for Layer 2 Blockchains, significantly improving scalability. The Ethereum development community is accelerating the pace of protocol upgrades. Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko emphasized during the meeting that the most common suggestion in the Pectra Retrospective forum was to "accelerate Ethereum upgrades." To achieve this, Beiko suggested determining the scope of the next upgrade as soon as possible after the previous upgrade goes live on the Ethereum mainnet. Beiko further proposed freezing the scope of the next Fusaka upgrade to EOF and PeerDAS, without spending too much time hesitating on including more EIPs and delaying upgrade progress, allowing developers to start researching Fusaka quickly and discuss the scope of the next Hard Fork Glamsterdam. A deadline of April 10th was set during the meeting to finalize the scope of Fusaka. Fusaka is the next upgrade after Pectra, including several EIPs, focusing on improving the scalability and security of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EOF) and PeerDAS (sampling data availability through peer-to-peer networks to improve data availability and enhance overall network efficiency and flexibility). Cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm has warned that Ethereum must accelerate its protocol upgrade speed, achieve more milestones on its technical roadmap, and maintain its leading position as a Layer 1 Blockchain. Ethereum can now begin to accelerate the implementation of many impactful improvements without sacrificing its value. Discussions on value trade-offs may be premature and could lead to rigidity. We believe that agreeing to deliver faster is the most important thing the Ethereum community can do to expand the space for possibilities and enable the protocol to realize its ambitious roadmap. Accelerating Ethereum's development will allow more people to enjoy permissionless innovation, paving the way for a truly global, trust-minimized financial system. Related Reports: Vitalik reveals BTCHoldings are less than 10%, with the rest all in ETH! Community sentiment: Holding 90% ETH in the past, now BTC is the largest Position… Ethereum core developers express disillusionment: Foundation out of touch with the community, losing passion for ETH Ethereum 2025 Outlook: Pectra upgrade, regulatory-friendly, tokenization.. Can ETH break its all-time high? Ethereum Foundation transfers 81,000 ETH to four major Decentralized Finance platforms: will soon explore staking and more deployments "Ethereum is stepping up! Development community: Accelerate deployment of new Hard Fork, Pectra upgrade estimated to go live on 4/8" This article was first published on BlockTempo, the most influential blockchain news media in the dynamic area.