Q1: What Is BSC Pascal hardfork
The BNB Chain Pascal hardfork, scheduled for February 25, 2025 (testnet) and mid-March 2025 (mainnet), is a significant upgrade designed to maintain compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem, specifically incorporating Ethereum Execution Layer EIPs from the Pectra upgrade.
A key feature of the Pascal hardfork, driven by BNB Evolution Proposals (BEPs) and specifically incorporating Ethereum’s EIP-7702 (as highlighted in the BNB Chain 2025 technical roadmap), introduces and enables native support for smart contract wallets. This functionality significantly enhances account abstraction, allowing user accounts to be managed directly by smart contracts rather than solely by externally owned accounts (EOAs) controlled by private keys.
While BNBChain users will generally be unaffected, this upgrade brings substantial improvements to BSC’s cryptography, cross-chain interactions, historical data access, and network efficiency. Most existing smart contracts will remain compatible, although those with extreme gas cost sensitivity might require adjustments. The main focus on this upgrade is to enable Ethereum Pectra EIP, especially those on Ethereum Execution Layer.
For the list of EIPs and target date, pls refer:
- Testnet: BNB Chain Upgrades(Testnet)
- Mainnet: BNB Chain Roadmap(Mainnet)
Unlike Ethereum, BSC will not increase the blob throughput in Pascal hard fork, BSC will keep the blob target as 3 and blob maximum as 6.
Q2: As a user, what should I do?
As a typical BNB Chain user (holding tokens, using dApps, or interacting via wallets like MetaMask or Trust Wallet), you generally don’t need to take any action for the Pascal hardfork. Your tokens will be unaffected, and most dApps will continue functioning normally. Wallet providers will handle necessary updates. The upgrade is primarily a behind-the-scenes improvement to the network. Only those running full or validator nodes need to upgrade their software. While highly unlikely, users of dApps extremely sensitive to gas cost changes should check for announcements from those dApp developers, just in case. Otherwise, it’s a “do nothing” event for the average user.
Q3: As a developer, what should I do?
As a BNB Chain developer, the Pascal hardfork introduces a change to the block header structure that requires your immediate attention if your project directly encodes or decodes block headers. A new field, RequestsHash, has been added, as defined in bsc/core/types/block.go at master · bnb-chain/bsc · GitHub and driven by BEP-466: Make the block header format compatible with EIP-7685 to align with Ethereum’s EIP-7685. While the RequestsHash field is currently reserved (its specific use on BSC is not yet defined), it must be included in your encoding/decoding logic, and it will be factored into the calculation of the block header root hash. Failure to account for this new field will result in incorrect hash calculations and potential incompatibility with the updated network. Update your code to handle this new RequestsHash element within the block header structure to ensure proper functionality after the Pascal hardfork.
EIP-7702’s introduction on BNB Chain necessitates a fundamental shift for developers. Developers should leverage the testnet extensively and explore new design patterns enabled by contract accounts, such as multi-sig, account recovery, spending limits, batch transactions, and session keys, while abandoning assumptions about direct private key control over accounts.
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