Ethereum developers set May 7 as the target date for the long-awaited Pectra upgrade on Thursday, beginning the countdown for the blockchain’s biggest changes since March 2024.

Pectra contains a series of improvements aimed at making Ethereum more user-friendly and efficient. One such improvement is adding «smart contract» capabilities to wallets, which can make them easier to use and recover.

The decision to schedule Pectra was made during a call between Ethereum’s core developers — just over a week after the upgrade went live on the Hoodi testnet without any hiccups. Pectra’s test on Hoodi was the third and final dry-run of the upgrade. Two earlier tests had bugs, which led the developers to delay the upgrade on Ethereum’s mainnet.

Pectra consists of 11 major code changes, or «Ethereum improvement proposals» (EIPs), that will be shipped all at once. Together, the features aim to improve the staking experience, introduce wallet features, and update the overall network.

One of the main Pectra changes that will benefit Ethereum validators is EIP-7251, which will increase the amount of ETH one can stake from 32 to 2,048. The change is meant to alleviate the experience for those staking across multiple validators, who can now set that up under one node instead of multiple.

Read more: Ethereum’s Final Pectra Test Goes Live on Hoodi Network

The team behind interoperability protocol Hyperlane shared Thursday their upcoming token airdrop plans happening at the end of the month.

The airdrop will occur on April 22, and users can check their eligibility to receive $HYPER tokens via a portal provided by the Hyperlane Foundation by April 13, the team shared in a press release with CoinDesk.

The token distribution will mostly go to the community, with 57% of the supply going to users, while the remaining circulating tokens will be distributed to the core team (25%), investors (10.9%), and the foundation’s treasury (7.1%).

The team also shared that the airdrop will be fully unlocked for community recipients, while the core team and investors’ tokens will be locked for the first 12 months.

In addition to the token distribution to early users, Hyperlane is coming out with their “expansion rewards” program, which is based on developer and cross-chain end-user activity, and will be distributed to users each quarter proportional to their activity on the network.

“The retroactive token allocation at TGE is just the first of many over the coming several years, as protocol ownership begins moving into the hands of the developers and end-users who rely on Hyperlane to send assets and other critical messages across chains,” said Nam Chu Hoai, a co-founder of Hyperlane.

Read more: Blockchain Startup Hyperlane Raises $18.5M Round Led by Crypto Investor Variant

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2425.32, down 6.8% (-176.31) since 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

None of the 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: BCH (-3.5%) and BTC (-4.7%).

Laggards: SOL (-12.5%) and SUI (-10.1%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.