The Ethereum Core team has announced plans to halt support for the Holesky testnet by September 2025. As part of the transition process, preparations are underway to retire the testnet eventually. It is a frequent practice to retire testnets, as illustrated by the Ethereum developers’ previous discontinuation of Kiln, Ropsten, Rinkeby in 2022, and Goerli last year.
Launched in September 2023, Holesky, along with Sepolia, is one of Ethereum’s main testnets. It has played a pivotal role as a public testnet for staking, infrastructure, and protocol development.
The Holesky testnet experienced disruptions during the Pectra upgrade testing. Despite several weeks of recovery efforts, Holesky is now achieving finality. However, the validator exit queue is still congested, restricting its use in specific community testing scenarios. The time it takes for exiting validators to fully leave the validator set, approximately a year, makes Holesky impractical for Pectra testing. Still, the Ethereum Foundation emphasized in a recent blog post that other features will continue to be supported.
To manage this situation, a new testnet, Hoodi, has been introduced. Hoodi will activate the Pectra network upgrade on March 26, before the mainnet release expected in the second quarter. The foundation advises staking operators and infrastructure providers to use Hoodi for validator testing.
Developers have agreed to keep Holesky operational in the short term, potentially repurposing it as a core developer testnet for experiments such as gas limit increases and other protocol stress tests.
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