Ethereum (ETH) The foundation announced in a blog post today that the blockchain’s Ropsten testnet (testnet) has begun to be shut down and is expected to be shut down completely between December 15-31.
The news comes as developers have gradually stopped participating in this testnet over the past few months and participation rates have dropped.
Ethereum runs testnets so developers can run their software before making it available on ETH’s mainnet.
Testnets essentially act as replicas of the Ethereum mainnet, allowing client teams, infrastructure providers, and developers to test changes they make to their applications before launching them in a high-risk environment.
Ethereum Developers To Switch To Goerli or Sepolia After Ropsten Network Shutdown
Ethereum will also shut down the Rinkeby testnet in mid-2023, giving developers ample time to migrate applications they run on the testnets to Goerli or Sepolia.
All these testnets played important roles in development and testing before the big Merge upgrade, when ETH moved from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.
Goerli and Sepolia have both run their own tests for Merge (i.e. they switched from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake), so they are testnets most similar to the environment in which the Ethereum blockchain operates today. Therefore, these testnets are expected to continue to work.
In October, blockchain researcher Etherscan shut down infrastructure support for Rinkeby and Ropsten.
Ethereum developers are constantly creating new testnets based on what upgrades they are trying to test. In November, ETH developers agreed to launch the Shandong testnet that addresses some ETH Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for Shanghai, the protocol’s next major upgrade.
*Not investment advice.
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