The underlying architecture is solid, PeerDAS is ready to go, where are developers heading?

Source: OKX Ventures
Key Points

•         Pectra (Prague + Electra) is the largest hard fork bundle upgrade since The Merge, containing 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) designed to simultaneously reduce data costs, simplify smart account operations, and optimize validator operations.

•         EIP-7691 doubles the Blob target capacity to 6 and increases the hard cap to 9. This has brought gas fees on L1 Data Availability (DA) down to under ~1 Gwei, and swap fees on the main L2 briefly dropped to under ~$0.02.

•         Every Externally Owned Account (EOA) can now be converted to a Smart Account with a single transaction (EIP-7702), enabling gas fee sponsorship, stablecoin payment fees, and a batch user experience without the need for contract migration.

•         The validator cap was increased to 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251), significantly reducing DevOps costs for large operators without significantly affecting decentralization.

•          PeerDAS will be the next step in the Fusaka upgrade, and will be far more important to Roll-ups than any single EIP in Pectra.

OKX Ventures’ view: Pectra itself is not the “turning point for modular DA”; it is the last critical piece of the puzzle that enables L2 to attract mass-market users while Ethereum maintains settlement dominance. The future winners will be those who (a) externalize all UX friction via 7702-style accounts, (b) leverage the benefits of Blob to drive new data-intensive verticals (on-chain AI, order book DEXs, content storage), and (c) double down on the stack of proof compression technologies before PeerDAS.

OKX Ventures hosted a Twitter Space event on May 13, inviting guests who were directly involved in code writing or infrastructure operations after the fork to discuss these changes in depth.

At the event, OKX Ventures took a close look at these changes with those who have to deliver code or run hardware after the fork goes live:

•         Derek Lee – Core Protocol Product Manager, Offchain Labs

•         Leonardo Lerer – Core Product Manager, StarkWare

•         Qi Zhou – EthStorage Co-founders

•         Pok Kopp – Co-founder, Ether.fi

•         Esme Zheng – Investor, OKX Ventures

I. Who changed direction and who felt the shockwaves in the first week?

Arbitrum – Derek No code had to be rewritten, but each Arbitrum instance had to upgrade its embedded Geth client. The only EIP he really cared about was 7691: doubling the Blob target capacity means more low-fee space for DEX and gaming users.

Pectra Backward Progress:

•         BoLD permissionless fraud proofs went to testnet in April, with mainnet planned for “before Q4”.

•         Stylus compiles hundreds of Rust/C contracts per day — llama.cpp reasoning and real-time chess engines were examples Derek showed off. • TimeBoost has replaced the “first-price auction” mechanism in the Arbitrum sorter memory pool, improving the fairness of transaction inclusion. Starknet – Leo Pectra primarily adjusts Starknet’s Blob cost model; Cairo 1.x’s fee schedule remains unchanged. The bigger shift is in StarkWare’s own roadmap: the reduction in L1 Data Availability (DA) costs has reduced the urgency for Volition (selective off-chain data) and redirected attention to stateless client research.

Decentralization Milestones:

•         Staking v2 (proof by block reward) will be released this quarter.

•         Sorter as a Service (v0.14) — a 3f+1 Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) cluster — will be online in 2025; cheaper blobs may allow them to shorten proof generation cycles without increasing fees.

EthStorage – Qi Zhou Higher Blob activity is a boon — his storage layer now plans to provide ongoing incentives when Ethereum discards data after two weeks. Pectra also forced a fleet-wide Geth upgrade; a group of operators using v1.13.8 froze mid-epoch.

Shockwaves:

•         Node Operators: 732 validators raised stakes above 32 ETH in 48 hours.

•         Roll-up Users: With Blob Gas fees falling back to ~1 Gwei, swap fees on the main L2 dropped to under two cents, despite mempool volatility.

•         Infrastructure Developers: Go-Ethereum’s quick point release puts all developers running archive nodes on high alert.

OKX Ventures View: Cheap blobs, disposable accounts, and larger validators are not headline features; they are the basic "plumbing" that allows the next headline feature to land smoothly. PeerDAS will soon verify this assertion.

II. EIP In-depth Analysis

Scaled Smart Accounts (EIP-7702)

EIP-7702 allows any externally owned account (EOA) to behave as a smart account in a single transaction, inheriting batch call, gas sponsorship, and stablecoin payment functions without contract migration.

Starknet has been in the AA (account abstraction) world since the genesis block. Leo gives an example: Productivity app FocusTree quietly deployed an account for each mobile user and began minting achievement NFTs backed by sponsorship fees. Users didn't even realize they were operating on-chain.

EthStorage will use pay-masters to fund users' first ten transactions - for example, deploying a personal website with one click through Blob.

Arbitrum already has GMX, Camelot, and Plays integrated with the 7702 process through third-party AA providers. Derek expects the first direct metric to improve will be transaction success rate and refunds for failed redemptions, followed by a second wave of Web2 native user import channels.

OKX Ventures' view: 7702 removes the ultimate self-custody user experience barrier. The investable areas are payers who do Gas arbitrage between different tokens and chains, and security middleware that enforces spending limits and fraud rules at the AA layer.

Cheaper Data (EIP-7691)

Arbitrum: Every Roll-up competes for the same pool of blobs; doubling capacity simply “provides breathing room before congestion pricing kicks in.”

Starknet only publishes state diffs; cheaper blobs unlock no new features, but lower the overall cost per transaction and help avoid a shift to “opt-in” (opt-in off-chain data).

EthStorage estimates that the new capacity (~3 TB every 12 days) will finally make it possible for static websites smaller than 100MB — including vitalik.ca — to be stored entirely in blobs. One caveat: on-chain transaction gas fees are now the bottleneck, often exceeding long-term storage costs. Qi is pushing for block-level access lists and higher gas limits to ease this constraint.

OKX Ventures’ view: Data focus is shifting back to on-chain; the near-term addressable market (TAM) is non-financial Blob-native content (AI reasoning weights, game assets, social graphs) that can tolerate Blob expiration if there are retrieval incentives. Long-term tail retrieval and proof markets will become key infrastructure.

Validator cap 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251)

Data point: Only 732 / 1,000,000 validators have increased their stakes to date - no centralization panic.

Arbitrum & Starknet: Pure operational win - lower DevOps costs with minimal impact on users. Theoretically, the risk of slashing per validator has increased, but Leo considers this an "interesting academic question" rather than a practical obstacle.

EthStorage: Allows running hot/cold validator replicas without increasing infrastructure expenditures; makes large-scale blob proofs more reliable. Qi highlighted the operational advantages of staking services: fewer devices, same returns, and running hot standby validators without doubling the hardware budget.

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

3.PectraPost-Roadmap Signaling

PeerDAS (FusakaHard Fork, EIP-7623)

Every speaker used the same adjective: existential. Derek called it “critical and non-negotiable” — Offchain Labs already has Prism engineers involved in spec discussions, because Arbitrum’s fraud proof throughput is ultimately limited by DA bandwidth. Leo sees PeerDAS as “the root of the entire L2 roadmap”; once sampling is live, he can increase Starknet’s proof frequency without worrying about blob fees. Qi has already written the economic foundation for that world — EthStorage will pay incentives to peers to continue to maintain its availability after the protocol forgets about sampling blobs.

Verkle Trees & History Expiration

Qi sees the two paths as complementary. Verkle trees reduce witness data size and enable stateless clients; history expiration reduces full node disk space by half by discarding old blocks. He estimates about 50% storage savings, but only if there is a retrieval market - Portal + EthStorage - to pay someone to store cold data. Leo is less concerned about the savings and more about the functionality unlocked by Verkle trees: a phone that can verify Ethereum without syncing with the state. He wants to observe how the Beacon client handles statelessness before porting the idea to Starknet.

SSZ Object Transactions (EIP-6404 series)

Qi is leading the first public testnet. The promise: smaller witness data, faster decoding, and perfect alignment with the Verkle tree object hashing model. Derek is agnostic for now ("Roll-up can absorb either format"), and Starknet is just monitoring - Cairo already serializes with its own field element layout.

Contract Size 128 KB (EIP-7907)

If you've ever split a monolith into 24 KB pieces, you know the pain. Qi and Curve’s development teams are leading the patch, but the blocker isn’t consensus — it’s the need for a DDoS-resistant gas meter for very large deploy transactions.

Block-level access lists

Qi’s benchmarks show that preloading state in parallel can reduce Geth’s IO wait time by about 70%. This in turn justifies raising the gas limit, which directly reduces the cost of publishing blobs. He is collecting mainnet tracking data to prove this tradeoff.

OKX Ventures Insight: Pectra is a “comfort” release; the next twelve months will focus on data availability, stateless verification, and ultimately giving developers the space to deploy large, complex contracts without workarounds.

Fourth, the macro picture -How will all this expand the moat?

The key metric to watch is settled value. Leo expects the compound growth curve of L2 throughput to exceed all other key performance indicators (KPIs), and he believes that "each Roll-up will bring its own exponential growth." If this statement is true, the settlement layer to which all these L2s are anchored - Ethereum - will capture the entire flywheel effect.

Developer retention rates are finally looking healthy. Qi's touchstone is the Web2 team's trial of AAwallets and subsidizedBlobs - neither of which existed in a credible form six months ago.

Security budgets are about to be repriced. Derek noted that validator integration coupled with a re-hypothecation mechanism like EigenLayer will shift revenue from idle staking to active validation services. Ether that once sat idle in a personal 32 ETH hot wallet is being transformed into remote proof income for oracles, bridges, and DSPs.

Is Pectra a "pivot"? That's a misnomer. Panelists agreed: even with only 40% Blob utilization, large Roll-ups will not move to Celestia or EigenDA. Ethereum's **Data Availability (DA)** remains the most cost-effective trust premium in crypto. Continue to scale the base layer and the delegation market will take care of the rest.

Derek’s core point: “Not a complete pivot, but a doubling down on making Ethereum faster and Roll-up more comfortable.”

Qi added: Killer UX upgrades will still be prototyped on L1 first — 7702 already did, and PeerDAS sampling will follow this path — and then cascade down to L2.

OKX Ventures’ point: The synergy between the highly modular Roll-up stack and the ever-expanding L1 capacity curve forms a flywheel that no monolithic chain can match. Pectra didn’t “save Ethereum”; it just cleared the last UX gap before PeerDAS could increase DA by 25x.
V. Hot Topic: Is Pectra “Enough”?

Roll-up DA Selection: Unanimous No — Arbitrum, Starknet, and EthStorage have no plans to move to external DAs, even if Blob utilization remains below 60%.

Non-Technical Levers: Derek believes that there should be a continued focus on L1 expansion and Roll-up support; no issuance game is needed. Qi said: L1 expansion experiments (block-level access lists, larger gas limits) will originate from Ethereum and backward propagate to L2.

Sixth,OKX VenturesFuture Investment Strategy

Smart account infrastructure will become the default consumer entry. EIP-7702, combined with a third-party payer mechanism, will compress the two-year gap between crypto-native contract design and large-scale user guidance. OKX Ventures prioritizes investments in modular payer liquidity networks, intent relays, and AArisk scoring engines, enabling any Web2 application to provide "stablecoin payment gas fees" and "one-click registration" features from day one.

BlobNative content is the next white space. A Storage incentive layer that guarantees retrieval of blobs after protocol expiration is very promising. Cheap blobs combined with a storage incentive layer will create a medium where games, AI models, and social media can be built entirely on Ethereum security.

Restaking will absorb the funds saved by validators. EIP-7251 frees up hardware budgets and activates idle ether. Protocols that can turn this collateral into measurable security - such as Oracle Proofs, Bridge Validation, Shared Sorter Sets - will receive outsized returns. OKX Ventures expects "investment-grade" restaking targets to become scarce and is actively funding teams with the clearest risk-adjusted accounting.

PeerDASis the real turning point. When sampling DA lands, Roll-ups can dilute marginal DA costs 10x without giving up trust in Ethereum. Teams currently building data sampling clients, proof compression circuits, or DA marketplaces will master the core tooling layer after Fusaka activates. OKX Ventures is actively looking for tools, proof compression, and data availability market projects that can get a head start on Fusaka.