Pectra Upgrade is Live on Sepolia

Ethereum’s much-anticipated Pectra upgrade has successfully gone live on the Sepolia testnet as of March 5, 2025. This follows the Pectra testing on the Holesky testnet.

Source: eipsinsight.com

Before Sepolia’s successful upgrade, Ethereum developers faced significant challenges during the Holesky testnet deployment on February 24, 2025. A misconfiguration in the deposit contract address caused a network split, with different clients forming divergent chains.

Geth, Nethermind, and Besu accepted an incorrect chain, while Erigon and Reth rejected invalid blocks, leading to a network desynchronization. This issue resulted in non-finalization and slashing risks for validators.

In response, Ethereum developers implemented rapid recovery strategies, including enhanced slashing protection, better fork detection, and faster validator synchronization. These lessons have now fortified the Pectra upgrade to ensure a smoother transition on the mainnet.

With Pectra now live on Sepolia, the Ethereum community is closely monitoring its performance before deploying it on the mainnet.

Sepolia has successfully upgraded to Pectra 🚀

(Hope I don't jinx it this time) pic.twitter.com/pPtufWbHh2

— terence (@terencechain) March 5, 2025

Ethereum core devs will discuss more on this during the All Core Developers (ACD) call. As testing continues, all eyes are now set on the final deployment to the Ethereum mainnet.

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