Ethereum’s Holesky Testnet Fails to Launch, a Rare Technical Misstep for the Blockchain
Ethereum developers failed to get their new test network, Holesky, up and running on Friday, wiping out a technological milestone intended to mark the first anniversary of last year’s historic “Merge” upgrade.
While some validators were able to launch the test network manually, according to Ethereum core developers, there was a misconfiguration in one of the network’s genesis files.
We had a misconfiguration in the el genesis file and that led to the holesky network improperly launching. Some validators manually fixed the config and were able to start the chain, but not enough for the network to finalize. https://t.co/5fchlRBCP3
— parithosh | 🐼👉👈🐼 (@parithosh_j) September 15, 2023
The episode represents a rare blunder for Ethereum, which has managed to smoothly roll out major upgrades over the past year, including “Merge” a year ago and “Shapella” in April, while continuing rapid growth in its rapid growth integrate. expanding ecosystem of secondary networks known as Layer 2 blockchains.
Ethereum is the second largest blockchain after Bitcoin, but is closely watched because it is the largest among those that can support smart contracts, which are chains of programs that can be embedded into the network to carry out functions and applications, similar to at a computer.
Developers can still use Goerli.
Test networks or testnets are clones of a blockchain used to simulate transactions and test applications before deploying them on a mainnet blockchain. Ethereum developers created the Holesky testnet to replace one of the blockchain’s current testnets, Goerli.
The Goerli testnet is still active, so developers can continue to test their applications on this network. Developers plan to hire Goerli in early 2024.
Holesky is intended to alleviate some scaling issues for Ethereum, as developers are expected to allow twice as many validators to join the network compared to the mainnet.
“It is possible to revive the network with a fix, but we decided that it is probably cleaner to start fresh, considering that it will be a new network that will be around for years,” said Parithosh Jayanthi, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation.
Holesky is also said to be crucial to Ethereum’s next hard fork, Dencun, where Proto-Danksharding, a technical feature for scaling the blockchain, is set to go live. Jayanthi told AskFX that the setback in Holesky’s launch should not impact the timing of Dencun. “This will not affect Dencun at all,” he said.
Friday’s launch was intended to mark the first anniversary of “Merge,” Ethereum’s historic event in which it became a “proof-of-stake” blockchain and replaced its legacy, energy-intensive “proof-of-work” model replaced.
