Ethereum After Pectra: Plumbing Fixed, PeerDAS Loading — What Builders Do Next

9 min readMay 19, 2025

TL;DR

Pectra (Prague + Electra) is the largest hard-fork bundle since The Merge — 11 EIPs that simultaneously cheapen data, streamline smart-accounts, and rationalize validator operations.
EIP-7691 doubled the blob target to 6 and raised the hard cap to 9. L1 DA gas dipped below ≈ 1 gwei, and swap fees on major L2s briefly came in under ≈ $0.02.
Every EOA can now morph into a smart-account for a single tx (EIP-7702), unlocking sponsored gas, stablecoin fees, and batched UX with zero contract migrations.
Validator caps raised to 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251), removing a major DevOps tax for large operators without meaningfully denting decentralization.
PeerDAS is next up in Fusaka — far more consequential for roll-ups than any single EIP in Pectra.

OKX Ventures’ thesis: Pectra is not a “modular DA pivot” on its own; it is the final missing piece that lets L2s capture mass-market users while Ethereum preserves settlement dominance. The winners will be stacks that (a) externalize all UX friction via 7702-style accounts, (b) harvest the blob windfall to push new data-heavy verticals (on-chain AI, order-book DEXs, content storage), and © double down on proof-compression ahead of PeerDAS.

OKX Ventures hosted a Twitter Space on May 13, where we invited guests who are directly involved in writing code or operating infrastructure right after the fork to dive deep into these changes.

In the space, we put those changes under a microscope with people who had to ship code or run hardware the minute the fork went live:

Derek Lee — Core Protocol PM, Offchain Labs
Leonardo Lerer — Core PM, StarkWare
Qi Zhou — Co-Founder, EthStorage
Pok Kopp — Co-Founder, Ether.fi
Esme Zheng — Investment Manager, OKX Ventures

1. Who changed course, and who felt the blast radius, inside the first week?

Arbitrum — Derek Nothing needed rewriting, but every Arbitrum instance had to bump its embedded Geth. The only EIP he truly cared about was 7691: doubling the blob target means more low-fee head-room for DEX and game users.
Starknet — Leo Pectra mostly tweaked Starknet’s blob cost model; Cairo 1.x fee tables stayed put. The bigger shift was inside StarkWare’s own roadmap: the cheaper L1 DA dims the urgency of volition and nudges attention back to stateless-client research.
EthStorage — Qi Zhou Higher blob churn is a gift — his storage layer now plans for persistent incentives the moment Ethereum discards data after two weeks. Pectra also forced a fleet-wide Geth upgrade; one operator cohort on v1.13.8 froze mid-epoch.

Blast radius:

Node operators: 732 validators bulked up past 32 ETH in 48 h.
Roll-up users: With blob gas back at ≈1 gwei, swap fees on major L2s dropped under two cents despite mem-pool turbulence.
Infra devs: Go-Ethereum’s rapid-fire point-releases kept anyone running archival nodes on their toes.

OKX Ventures insight: cheap blobs, throw-away accounts and fatter validators aren’t headline features; they are the plumbing that lets the next headline feature land without drama. PeerDAS will stress-test that thesis soon enough.

2. Deep-Dive by EIP

2.1 Smart-Accounts at Scale (EIP-7702)

EIP-7702 lets any EOA behave as a smart-account for a single transaction, inheriting batched calls, sponsored gas and stable-coin fee-payment without contract migration.

Starknet has lived in an AA world from block 0. Leo’s anecdote: productivity app FocusTree silently deployed an account for every mobile user and started minting achievement NFTs with fees sponsored. Users never noticed they were on-chain.
EthStorage will use pay-masters to underwrite a user’s first ten transactions — e.g., one-click deployment of a personal website entirely inside blobs.
Arbitrum already has GMX, Camelot and Plays integrating 7702 flows through third-party AA providers. Derek expects the immediate metric pop to be transaction success-rate and failed-swap refunds, followed by a second-wave of Web2-native onboarding funnels.

OKX Ventures insight: 7702 collapses the final self-custody UX hurdle. The investable surface is pay-masters that arbitrage gas across tokens and chains, and security middleware that enforces spend limits and fraud rules at the AA layer.

2.2 Cheaper Data (EIP-7691)

Arbitrum: every roll-up competes for the same blob pool; doubling capacity simply “gives breathing room before congestion pricing kicks in.”
Starknet posts only state-diffs; cheaper blobs do not unlock new features but lower the total-cost-per-tx and help stave off a switch to volition (selective off-chain data).
EthStorage calculates that the new capacity ( ≈3 TB every 12 days) finally makes it practical to pin <100 MB static sites — including vitalik.ca — entirely inside blobs. Caveat: on-chain transaction gas is now the bottleneck, often exceeding long-term storage costs. Qi is pushing for block-level access-lists and higher gas-limits to relieve that constraint.

OKX Ventures insight: Data gravity is shifting back on-chain; the near-term TAM is non-financial blob-native content (AI inference weights, gaming assets, social graphs) that can tolerate blob expiry if retrieval incentives exist. Long-tail retrieval and proof markets become critical infrastructure.

2.3 Validator Cap 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251)

Data point: only 732 / 1 000 000 validators have upsized stakes so far — no centralization panic.
Arbitrum & Starknet: Pure ops win — cheaper DevOps, negligible user effects. Slashing risk per validator rises in theory, but Leo framed it as an “interesting academic question” rather than a practical blocker.
EthStorage: Allows running hot-/cold validator replicas without doubling infra spend; makes large-scale blob attestation more reliable. Qi emphasised the operational upside for staking services: fewer boxes, same yield, plus budget to run hot-spare validators without doubling hardware.

OKX Ventures insight: Hardware cost savings will flow to restaking and shared-security markets, not directly to end users; watch EigenLayer-style protocols absorb the freed liquidity. More idle ETH → more security capacity.

3. Post-Pectra Roadmap Signals

PeerDAS (Fusaka fork, EIP-7623) Every speaker used the same adjective: existential. Derek called it “critical and non-negotiable” — Offchain Labs has Prism engineers embedded in the spec discussions because Arbitrum’s fraud-proof throughput ultimately bottlenecks on DA bandwidth. Leo framed PeerDAS as “the root of the entire L2 roadmap”; the moment sampling is live he can crank Starknet’s proof frequency without worrying about blob fees. Qi is already writing the economic plumbing for that world — EthStorage will pay incentivised peers to keep the sampled blobs available after the protocol forgets them.
Verkle vs. History Expiry Qi sees the two tracks as complementary. Verkle trees shrink witness sizes and enable stateless clients; History Expiry chops half the disk off a full-node by throwing away old blocks. He estimates ≈50 % storage savings, but only if there is a retrieval market — Portal + EthStorage — paying someone to keep cold data. Leo cares less about the savings and more about what Verkle unlocks: a phone that can verify Ethereum without syncing state. He wants to watch how the Beacon clients handle stateless mode before porting the idea into Starknet.
SSZ-Object Transactions (EIP-6404 family) Qi is shepherding the first public test-nets. The promise: smaller witnesses, faster decoding, and a clean alignment with Verkle’s object-hashing model. Derek is agnostic for now (“roll-ups can absorb either format”), while Starknet is simply monitoring — Cairo already serialises in its own field-element layout.
Contract-size 128 KB (EIP-7907) If you have ever split a monolith into 24 KB shards you know the pain. Qi and Curve’s dev-team are spearheading the patch, but the blocker isn’t consensus — it is a DDoS-safe gas-meter for very fat deploy-txs.
Block-level Access Lists Qi’s benchmarking shows that pre-loading state in parallel can cut Geth’s IO wait by ~70 %. That in turn justifies a higher gas-limit, which feeds straight back into cheaper blob publishing. He is gathering main-net traces to prove the trade-off.

OKX Ventures insight: Pectra was a comfort release; the next twelve months are about data availability, stateless verification, and finally giving developers room to ship large, complex contracts without hacks.

4. Macro picture — how does all this move the moat?

The metric worth chart-watching is value-settled. Leo expects the compound curve of L2 throughput to dwarf every other KPI: “each roll-up adds its own exponential.” If that thesis holds, the settlement layer that all those L2s anchor to — Ethereum — captures the fly-wheel.
Builder retention finally looks healthy. Qi’s litmus-test is Web2 teams kicking the tyres of AA wallets and subsidised blobs — two things that did not exist in credible form six months ago.
The security budget is about to re-price. Derek points out that validator consolidation plus EigenLayer-style rehypothecation pushes yield away from idle staking and into actively validated services. ETH that once sat in solo-32 hot wallets is turning into remote attestation income for oracles, bridges and DSPs.
Pectra as “pivot”? Wrong frame. The panel is unanimous: even if blob utilisation sits at 40 %, large roll-ups won’t jump ship to Celestia or EigenDA. Ethereum DA is still the cheapest trust-premium in crypto. Keep scaling the base layer and the delegation market will take care of the rest.
Derek’s one-liner: “No hard pivot — just double-down on making Ethereum faster and keeping roll-ups comfortable.”
Qi’s addendum: killer UX upgrades still prototype on L1 first — 7702 did, and PeerDAS sampling will too — before cascading to L2.

OKX Ventures insight: alignment between a ruthlessly modular roll-up stack and a relentlessly expanding L1 capacity curve is a fly-wheel no monolithic chain can match. Pectra didn’t “save Ethereum”; it cleared the last UX canyon before PeerDAS multiplies DA by 25×.

5. Hot-Take Section — Is Pectra “Enough”?

Roll-up DA choice: unanimous no — Arbitrum, Starknet, and EthStorage do not plan to switch to external DA even if blob utilization stays < 60 %.
Non-technical levers? Derek: keep focusing on L1 scaling & roll-up support; no issuance games needed. Qi: L1 scaling experiments (block-level access lists, bigger gas-limits) will originate on Ethereum and back-prop to L2s.

6. OKX Ventures Thesis Going Forward

Smart-account rails become the default consumer gateway. EIP-7702 plus third-party pay-masters compresses the two-year gap between crypto-native contract design and mass-market onboarding. We’re prioritising investments in modular pay-master liquidity networks, intent relays, and AA risk-scoring engines that let any Web2 app offer “gas-in-stables” and one-click sign-ups from day one.
Blob-native content is the next white-space. Storage-incentive layers that can guarantee blob retrieval after protocol expiry are promising. Cheap blobs + storage-incentive layers create a medium where games, AI models, and social media can live entirely on Ethereum security.
Restaking absorbs validator savings. EIP-7251 frees hardware budget and unleashes idle ETH. Protocols that can redirect that collateral into measurable security — oracle attestation, bridge validation, shared sequencer sets — will earn super-premium yields. We expect a scarcity of “investment-grade” restake targets and are seeding the teams with the clearest risk-adjusted accounting.
PeerDAS is the real pivot. When sampled DA lands, roll-ups can dilute marginal DA cost by 10× without abandoning Ethereum trust. Teams that are instrumenting data-sampling clients, proof-compression circuits, or DA marketplaces today will own the tooling layer once Fusaka activates. We are actively scouting tooling, proof-compression, and data-availability marketplaces that front-run Fusaka.

If you’re shipping in any of these directions — AA UX, blob-heavy verticals, proof systems, or DA marketplaces — our DMs are open.

7. Beyond capital — how we actually help founders

OKX Ventures sits inside the wider OKX ecosystem — wallets, infrastructure, global partnerships — but our value-add is hands-on:

Infrastructure at cost. We already run validators, sequencing nodes, and archival storage for multiple L1s and L2s. Portfolio teams tap that stack for test-net bootstrapping, main-net telemetry, and early governance quorum.
User funnels on tap. The OKX Wallet and its dApp hub surface AA flows, staking vaults, or restake dashboards to a multi-million-user base the moment projects are ready for traffic.
Global operating footprint. Our compliance and BD teams cover Asia, Europe, MENA, and LatAm — helping founders localise fiat ramps, KYC flows, and community events without starting from scratch.
Technical lift. We write reference code, run adversarial test-nets, and sit in Discord at 3 a.m. when a proof circuit or data-sampling client needs eyes.

Our investment bias is long-dated infrastructure that removes UX friction and deepens Ethereum’s economic moat — exactly why we were early backers of Offchain Labs (Arbitrum), StarkWare (Starknet), Ether.fi and other infra projects that now anchor the modular stack. We invest early, stay late, and grow alongside the people still pushing commits after the hype fades.

If that sounds like the partner you need for the post-Pectra era — let’s talk.