Months after the successful launch of the Shanghai upgrade, Ethereum (ETH) developers announced their plans to release the new Holesky testnet on September 15.
Named after the Nádražà Holešovice station in the Czech Republic, Holesky will replace Goerli, a testnet used to test the staking infrastructure during last year’s Ethereum Merge event. Holesky will have an LTS (Long Time Support) phase until 2027, with an additional End Of Life (EOL) period until 2028. Ethereum devs will use the new testnet during the implementation of Dencun, the next major update for the Ethereum blockchain.
The Dencun upgrade will deploy the Cancun execution layer and the Deneb consensus layer. As of writing, developers have greenlit five EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) for the Dencun upgrade, with EIP-4844 (Proto Danksharding), being one of them. This proposal seeks to increase the scalability of the Ethereum network by allowing Layer 2 rollups to include cheap data units called “blobs” in every transaction. The Dencun upgrade will also implement EIP-6780, a proposal to prevent the SELFDESTRUCT opcode from terminating a smart contract’s storage.
The Holesky testnet is scheduled for deployment on September 15, which is coincidentally the same date when the Ethereum Merge occurred last year.Â
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Meanwhile, developers will continue to use the Sepolia testnet to test decentralized apps and smart contracts, among other EVM functionality.