Ethereum Holešky Testnet to Sunset Ahead of Fusaka Upgrade

Ethereum’s largest testnet Holešky will soon shut down as part of a planned migration to the Hoodi testnet the Ethereum Foundation announced on ￰0￱ decision follows a series of technical issues earlier this year and comes just ahead of the Fusaka upgrade

which developers aim to deploy on mainnet in ￰1￱ in September 2023 Holešky was designed to test staking infrastructure and validator ￰2￱ the past two years it played a critical role in preparing the Ethereum network for protocol updates including the Pectra and Dencun ￰3￱ Foundation noted that Holešky had “served its purpose,” enabling thousands of validators to trial new features before they were introduced on ￰4￱ Holešky Nears End-of-Life However

the testnet faced difficulties in early 2025 including large-scale inactivity leaks that created significant exit queues for ￰5￱ the network eventually recovered developers decided to transition to Hoodi a newer testing environment launched in ￰6￱ is already supporting the Pectra update and is expected to handle future protocol upgrades

including ￰7￱ Foundation stated that Holešky will be shut down two weeks after the Fusaka upgrade is finalized on the ￰8￱ the precise date is not yet clear the transition must take place well before Fusaka’s scheduled mainnet activation in ￰9￱ its closure Holešky will no longer receive support from client testing

or infrastructure ￰10￱ and Beyond The Fusaka hard fork short for Fulu-Osaka is regarded as a major milestone for ￰11￱ is designed to improve how rollups access data by distributing workloads more efficiently across ￰12￱ believe this will make running nodes easier strengthen network decentralization

and improve layer-2 scalability allowing rollups to process transactions faster and at lower ￰13￱ is set to introduce 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) when it activates later this ￰14￱ further ahead the community is already preparing for the Glamsterdam upgrade expected in ￰15￱ its most anticipated features is EIP-7782

a proposal to halve block times to six seconds by separating block validation from ￰16￱ would give provers more time to generate zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine proofs further advancing the network’s scaling ￰17￱ momentum in development has coincided with market ￰18￱ publicly listed firms have added Ether to their treasuries in recent months a factor analysts link to ETH’s more than 200% price surge since April.