How Ethereum Is Faring Since Its Major Pectra Upgrade

A month after the Pectra upgrade, the most important indicators on Ethereum started to reveal the promise and pitfalls of the most ambitious technical overhaul of the network since the “merging” of 2022.

One of the most important characteristics that brought the Pectra upgrade was the expansion of the capacity of the Ethereum blockchain to “blobs”, which are units of “ephemeral data storage”, so that larger quantities of these are kept on the consensu layer, according to one definition of the protocol developer team.

A Blob is a special data structure that can store larger amounts of data. More Blobs means that transactions, low-2 networks and rollup operations can even become cheaper.

“The nearly zero costs of Blobs are an important unlocking for Ethereum scalability,” said Ulyana Skladchikova, product of the product of open-source multi-chain explorer blockcout, said Decrypt.

The same aspect has made it “more cost-efficient for low-2s to post data and make high-throughput, low-cost rollups possible,” she explained.

Those high-throughput and cheap rollups include popular networks such as the Coinbase-inspired base, arbitrum and optimism, which can now process thousands of transactions for money instead of dollars.

For Ethereum this means that “its modular vision delivers” that “could offer real benefits that are already visible in L2 ecosystems,” said Skladchikova.

Blobs became cheaper

A week after the Pectra upgrade, rollups such as base and arbitrum paid less than a fraction of a cent for transactions on a daily basis.

“Blobs are again almost free, for the first time since mid -April 2025,” wrote Zack Pokorny, research analyst at Digital Asset Firm Galaxy, in a May 15th report.

Since Pectra went live, the totally only “four thousandth of a cent” was added, according to Pokorny, according to data from their dune with around $ 16,000 daily before the pectra upgrade dashboard For blobs.

The component that was responsible for this was EIP-7691that introduced Blob -scale distribution On Pectra. In the days after the activation of Pectra, Blob use increased by around 20%, with daily Blob purchases rising to 25,600.

Despite the increase, the roles have not yet fully used the extensive capacity. That resulted in a significant decrease in Blob prices, Pokorny explained.

By the end of May, the use of Blob had increased to around 28,000, which represents an increase of 33% since Pectra went live, aggregated data Compiled by Crypto Intelligingbedrijf Coin Metrics shows.

Validator consolidation

Although the reduction in the Blob costs improved the profit margins for rollups, it also offered challenges for validators.

The cost improvements on Blobs indirectly increased “the data load for validators,” said Skladchikova van Blockscout Decrypt. Yet this can be seen as a consideration, she argued.

Validators are people or organizations that help run Ethereum by keeping it safe and processing transactions. They do this by locking part of their own ETH as a down payment – this is called ‘deployment’. In exchange, they can earn ETH solutions. But if the hardware they use to validate transactions, goes offline too often or breaks the rules, they can lose part of the ETH they have put.

Because some smaller validators may not be able to afford the new costs of processing more data without risking a fine, they have been combined with larger activities that can handle both the higher stake limits and the growing storage burden.

“Validator consolidation often evokes concern about centralization,” said Skladchikova, “but in the case of Ethereum the effect can actually be decentralization.”

The prize of Ethereum saw a wild revival in May when he reached a price of around $ 1,800 at the start of the month to a peak near $ 2,800. Even a bit to $ 2,510, ETH is currently increasing by 27% in the last 30 days.

Published by Stacy Elliott.