James Richardson
Ethereum’s core development team has announced plans to phase out support for the Holesky testnet by September 2025. This move comes as part of Ethereum’s ongoing testnet lifecycle management, ensuring that testing environments remain efficient and up-to-date.
Deprecating testnets is a routine process. In recent years, Ethereum developers have discontinued Kiln, Ropsten, and Rinkeby in 2022, followed by Goerli in 2023.
Launched in September 2023, Holesky has been a crucial testnet for staking, infrastructure, and protocol development, alongside Sepolia. However, it encountered challenges during Pectra upgrade testing, leading to network disruptions. Despite successful restoration efforts, a congested validator exit queue remains, limiting its effectiveness for some community-driven tests.
Ethereum developers noted that fully exiting validators from Holesky would take around a year, making it impractical for Pectra-related validator testing. However, other functionalities will continue to be supported in the interim.
Hoodi Testnet to Replace Holesky for Validator Testing
To address Holesky’s limitations, Ethereum has introduced a new testnet, Hoodi, which will serve as the primary environment for Pectra upgrade testing. The Hoodi testnet is set to activate on March 26, ahead of Ethereum’s mainnet upgrade in Q2 2025.
Moving forward, staking operators and infrastructure providers are encouraged to migrate to Hoodi for all validator-related testing, ensuring seamless preparation for the Pectra network upgrade.
Potential Future Use Cases for Holesky
While Holesky will be deprecated in the long run, Ethereum developers are considering repurposing it as a dedicated core developer testnet. This could make it a sandbox for protocol stress tests, including gas limit experiments and infrastructure optimizations.
The transition marks another step in Ethereum’s testnet evolution, ensuring that developers have reliable and scalable environments to continue innovating on the blockchain.
