Aside from staking, Ethereum dapps also have the potential to become more user-friendly now that Pectra’s in the bag – or at least they do for projects willing to take advantage of features such as account abstraction, enabled via EIP-7702. This allows externally owned accounts (EOAs) to temporarily act like smart contracts. What this means in practice is that a dapp can pay gas fees on behalf of the user, for example, which is ideal when it comes to onboarding.
The need to hold ETH in your wallet before you can do anything on Ethereum is something that isn’t necessarily intuitive to beginners. And even if they understand the basic concept, they may struggle to see why this rule is in place. Well, now they don’t need to: following Pectra, an Ethereum dapp can allow the user to purchase USDC using an integrated fiat gateway and then let them send that USDC – all without the need to convert part of it to ETH for gas.
Account abstraction has other uses too, particularly when it comes to account recovery. Normally when you lose your private keys you lose access to your wallet for good. Now, with support for social recovery, lost keys don’t have to be fatal. It’s another way in which Pectra supports smarter dapps that are easier to use, which in turn will make it simpler for users to enter the Ethereum ecosystem.
There’s a lot more that comes bundled with Pectra, from increased blob throughput (reducing rollup fees) to more advanced smart contract logic, but the key takeaway at this stage is this: Pectra’s working and Ethereum developers are working with Pectra. In the months ahead, everything from staking to Layer 2 dapps is going to improve – and it will be thanks in no small part to Pectra and the renewed capabilities and confidence it’s gifted Ethereum.
