Ethereum Announces First Long-Standing “Holli (Holesovice)” Testnet To Solve ETH Supply Issues

Ethereum News: Ethereum plans to launch a new testnet named “Holli” (or Holesovice) later this year. Ethereum core developers plan to transition from old testnets to new testnet and solve the ETH supply issues. The testnet will be the first long-standing, merged-from-genesis, public Ethereum testnet.

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko in a tweet on February 24 announced that the team plans to launch the Holli testnet near September 15, 2023. The plan to launch a new testnet has been in process since the Merge upgrade last September.

A new testnet, Holli, is planned to launch later this year, and hopefully we can figure out these things before then! I've made two suggestions on the repo, and would love to hear from application layer devs about how we could better approach this!

— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) February 23, 2023

He said old testnets end up being a problem for clients and node operators because it takes more time and space to sync. The Sepolia testnet addressed the supply issue by using a mintable ERC20 token for its beacon chain, instead of sepETH. This allowed validators to effectively mint SepETH, post-Shapella, and solve the supply issue.

Unfortunately, Sepolia isn’t open to permisionless validators, but Goerli is. The Goerli uses the Ethereum client GoETH for its beacon chain. So, over the past few months, an effort has started to create recurring ephemeral testnets for stakers and shadow forks to quickly test upgrades without running a testnet.

Therefore, before Holli testnet launch, Ethereum developers plan to get application developers easy access to testnet ETH tokens. Testnets help three distinct groups of users: client developers, application developers, and node operators/stakers/miners. However, the needs of each group are quite diverse.

Ethereum Developer’s Plan To Solve Problems With Testnet

Tim Beiko gave two suggestions to solve the problems. First, add each ETH address where the contract is deployed on the mainnet, Goerli, or Sepolia to the genesis file. Second, coordinate with major contract and infrastructure developers to launch on the network shortly after genesis.

Tim Beiko is currently seeking input from application layer developers on how to resolve this issue. Moreover, the name “Holli” is not final, it could be changed to Holesky or Holesovice.

Meanwhile, Ethereum prepares to enable the withdrawal of Ethereum staked on the Beacon chain with the Shanghai upgrade in March. Ethereum price currently trades at $1,653.

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