Ethereum’s biggest testnet, Holešky, will be taking the sunset as part of a planned closure and transition to Hoodi Testnet, following some technical issues earlier this year.
The foundation said Monday that Halsey will be closed two weeks after Fusaka’s upgrade is confirmed on the network. An upgrade is proposed later in September.
“After this, Holešky will no longer be supported by clients, tests or infrastructure teams,” he said. The exact date is not clear, but the Ethereum Core developer is about to launch Fusaka on Mainnet in November.
Holešky launched in September 2023 and was responsible for testing staking infrastructure and validator operations.
“The network serves its purpose and has enabled thousands of validators to test upgrades to Dencun networks and, more recently, upgrades to protocols, including Pectra,” the foundation said.
This move reflects the Ethereum community’s commitment to improving all network layers. While decentralization through staking and scalability has long been a priority, the foundation recently touted UX as one of Ethereum’s best leverage opportunities for the next 6-12 months.
Hoodie intervenes for the Whole Sheekey
Holešky reached a “planned end-of-life date,” but in early 2025 there was a “massive inactivity” which resulted in a large exit queue. Eventually it recovered, but the foundation launched its hoodie in March, providing a new testing environment that doesn’t involve these issues.
The foundation said one of the next steps is to migrate all staking operators and infrastructure from HOLESHI, which already supports Pectra updates and activates future protocol upgrades, including Fusaka Fork, to Hoodi.
For now, the Ethereum Foundation has recommended switching to Sepolia as the “recommended testnet” for smart contracts and distributed app testing.
Fusaka is still set for the second half of 2025
The next important hard fork of Ethereum is Fusaka-Fulu-osaka, scheduled for early November. We are looking to improve the way that rollups access data by more efficient distribution of data availability workloads.
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This change makes running nodes easier, improves network decentralization, improves layer 2 scalability, and allows rollups to process transactions faster and at a lower cost. Fusaka consists of 11 Ethereum improvement proposals.
Gramsterdam on track for 2026
The Glamsterdam upgrade based on EIP-7782 is scheduled for 2026 and is expected to include a proposal to halve the block time by 6 seconds.
The proposal aims to separate block verification from the run and give Prover more time to create zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine proofs, Ladislaus, the foundation’s protocol coordination team, told Cointelegraph in late July.
Recent developments of Ethereum also show an impact on the market. With several publicly listed companies establishing Ether (ETH) finances in recent months, it is the main catalyst behind ETH’s 200% or more price rally since April.
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