Ethereum Developers Introduce Hoodi Testnet for Final Pectra Verification

The team working on Ethereum has decided to shut down the network's biggest testnet, Holesky, which will be succeeded by a new trial environment named Hoodi.

In a blog post from March 19, the Ethereum Foundation revealed that they will stop supporting the Holesky testnet after it was negatively impacted by the highly anticipated Pectra upgrade last month.

The decision to stop using Holesky was made by developers following technical issues that occurred in February when Pectra was launched for testing. The upgrade caused Holesky's network to break down, making its validator set unusable for several weeks.

Engineers from the EF implemented a solution in March, but Holesky remained congested. A similar problem happened on Sepolia, Ethereum's (ETH) second-largest test environment, although developers were able to find a quick fix. These testnets are utilized by developers to simulate and troubleshoot network upgrades like Pectra before implementing them on Ethereum's mainnet.

Although the Holesky network has since finalized, it would take around one year for the exited validators to be completely removed from the validator set. While stakers can test deposits, consolidations, and all other Pectra features, the size of the exit queue prevents Holesky from being used to test the full validator lifecycle within a reasonable timeframe.

Blog post by EF

In the future, a new testnet named Hoodi will take the place of Holesky, as stated by EF DevOps engineer Paritosh Jayanthi and EF core coordinator Tim Beiko. Developers plan to test Pectra on Hoodi on March 26 as the final practice run before a mainnet launch. If the test is successful, the EF could deploy Pectra to ETH's main chain by April 25.