Ethereum team restarts Holesky testnet after outage

The Ethereum blockchain developers, on the second attempt запустили the Holesky test network after an unsuccessful attempt on the anniversary of The Merge upgrade.

On 15 September the project team had to move back the deployment date due to a misconfiguration in the genesis file. Some validators manually made changes and were able to boot the chain, but this proved insufficient to finalise the network.

The second launch was streamed live on YouTube. At around 11:00 (Kyiv/MSK), one of the developers confirmed the integration.

“The third [testnet] will not have to be built,” commented another programmer.

To complete the launch, the Ethereum team waited for the validators’ ‘participation level’ to reach 66%.

The new test network is expected to replace Goerli, which has been operating since 2019. Support for the latter will end in early 2024. It is expected that the updated version will run until 2028.

Holesky is designed to test staking solutions, assess infrastructure and protocols. Developers will also test new scaling features.

Holesky will differ from existing testnets by a significantly larger number of validators. The number of the latter will exceed the mainnet’s figure — this will allow testing solutions under more stringent conditions.

Holesky will play a key role in the planned hard fork called Dencun (Cancun-Deneb).

In June, the Ethereum team had preliminarily prepared packages for the forthcoming upgrade to the execution and consensus layers.