Hassan Maishera
TL;DR
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The Ethereum Foundation will sunset the Holesky testnet in two weeks.
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The shutdown will come after the Fusaka upgrade is finalized on the network.
Holesky Testnet to Leave Ethereum in Two Weeks
The Ethereum Foundation announced on Monday that Ethereum’s largest testnet, Holešky, will sunset in two weeks as it looks to migrate to the Hoodi testnet.
In its blog post, the foundation explained that Holešky will be shut down two weeks after the Fusaka upgrade is finalized on the network. The Fusaka upgrade is slated to take place in the second half of the month.
The foundation stated that,
“Holešky was launched in 2023 as Ethereum's largest public testnet, designed specifically for testing staking infrastructure and validator operations at scale. The network served its purpose, enabling thousands of validators to test protocol upgrades, including the Dencun network upgrade and, most recently, Pectra. Once the Fusaka upgrade is complete, Holešky will no longer be supported by client, testing, or infrastructure teams.”
The foundation also urged staking operators and infrastructure providers to migrate to Hoodi, which was launched specifically to address Holešky's limitations. Hoodi provides a fresh validator set, supports all Pectra features and will activate future protocol upgrades, including the upcoming Fusaka fork.
Furthermore, the team recommended switching to Sepolia as the “recommended testnet” for smart contract and decentralized app testing for now.
Ethereum’s next major hard fork, Fusaka, is slated for early November and is set to improve how rollups access data by distributing data availability workloads more efficiently across network validators.
The Ethereum Foundation believes that this improvement could make running nodes easier, improve network decentralization and boost layer-2 scalability. This is possible as rollups can process transactions faster and at lower cost.
