The End of an Era in Ethereum (ETH): Developers Make the Announcement

The Ethereum Foundation has announced that Holešky, one of Ethereum’s largest testnets, has reached the end of its lifespan and will soon be shut down.

According to the statement, following the announcement on September 1st, the majority of validators on the network will be disabled two weeks after the Fusaka upgrade is approved on Holešky. From that date onward, the client, testing, and infrastructure teams will also no longer support Holešky.

Holešky launched in 2023 as ETH’s largest public testnet, primarily used for large-scale testing of staking infrastructure and validator operations. During this time, the network hosted numerous protocol tests with thousands of validators, including Dencun and the recent Pectra upgrades.

However, after the Pectra testnet went live in early 2025, Holešky experienced network inactivity, and the validator exit queue became extremely long. While the network subsequently recovered and completed finalization, it became impossible to test the entire lifecycle of validators within a reasonable timeframe.

Following these issues, the Ethereum ecosystem launched a new testnet called Hoodi in March 2025, providing a more efficient and limitation-free testing environment.

*This is not investment advice.

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