Ethereum team launches Holesky testnet

Developers Ethereum launched the public test network Holesky, which will replace Goerli, in operation since 2019. However, at launch the team faced problems.

Holesky genesis didn’t go as expected, but that’s what testnets are here for.

See y’all again soon ?https://t.co/6TWicgIhaw pic.twitter.com/Pvkp0oKXC8

— beaconchain.eth ?? (@beaconcha_in) September 15, 2023

According to researcher Diederik Loerakker, the problem was caused by misconfiguration.

Someone put 0x686f77206d7563682069732074686520666973683f (\”how much is the fish?\”) as extra-data in the EL Holesky genesis.json, and not in the CL genesis.ssz

Misconfiguration, network failed to launch.

Also, some other fork params in releases are rumored to mismatch too.

Need…

— proto.eth (@protolambda) September 15, 2023

Holesky (Holešovice Testnet) was named after the railway station in Prague.

The new testnet is intended to test staking solutions, assess infrastructure and protocols. For testing decentralized applications, smart contracts and other Ethereum Virtual Machine-related functions, Sepolia will continue to be used.

Long-term support (LTS) for Holesky is expected to run until 2027, with end-of-life (EOL) arriving next year.

During a teleconference in August, Paritosh Jayanti of the Ethereum Foundation said that developers tested the network with 1.4 million validators. They recommended this cluster size as the starting point.

Goerli and Sepolia are governed by a smaller subset of validators than the Ethereum mainnet, which, at the time of writing, has just over 930,000. Some developers believed the number should be increased, Jayanti told CoinDesk.

“We don’t want to encounter the scaling problem that could arise primarily on the mainnet,” the developer said.

According to him, a larger testnet size would help test solutions under tougher conditions.

Another feature of Holesky will be 1.6 billion test ETH in circulation. In Goerli, a limit of 120 million goETH was set, corresponding to the market capitalisation of the second-largest cryptocurrency. However the cap occasionally proved problematic, driving up the cost of testing applications.

The launch date for the new testnet was set for September 15 — the anniversary of Ethereum the major The Merge upgrade.

As reported, after last year’s migration to the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism the network became more environmentally friendly, the cryptocurrency deflationary, but the ecosystem faced a number of problems.