Updated March 18, 2024: The Dencun network upgrade was successfully activated on the Ethereum mainnet on March 13, 2024According to the original wording of this announcement, this would imply an end date for the Goerli testnet of April 13, 2024.
That said, as I write this, almost all Goerli validatorswhich were run selflessly by various members of the community, have already been closedGoerli users and developers should therefore migrate to Sepolia or Holesky as soon as possible.
In the coming months, GoerliEthereum’s First Multi-Client Testnet to Stop Being Supported by Client Testing and EF TeamsThe Dencun network upgrade will be the last implementation on the network.
Either three months after the activation of Goerli Dencun or one month after the activation of the Dencun main network, whichever is laterTeams will start exiting their validators (1). Anyone relying on Goerli as a stable testnet should migrate elsewhere before that.
Although Goerli staking is permissionless, validators from the client and test teams make up a super majority of staking, so their exits will affect the stability of the network. Additionally, the teams plan to use the opportunity to test delayed finality, inactivity leaks, and mass outages.
Application and tool developers are encouraged to use Sepolia to test decentralized applications, smart contracts, and other EVM features. Its set of permissioned validators provides a stable testing environment. Alternatively, many local development environments allow testing on copies of the Ethereum mainnet state.
Actors and infrastructure providers concerned with protocol-level testing are encouraged to use the new Trousky test networkwhere anyone can run a validator. For validator setup testing, stakers should also consider Short-lived test network. This network resets weekly and allows for lightweight end-to-end testing of the validator lifecycle.
Goerli is expected to be the first testnet to activate the Dencun upgrade. Once the Goerli network upgrade date is set, this article will be updated to reflect it. The upgrade will be announced on this blog and you can sign up to receive an email alert here.
Goerli was started and maintained in a way that is emblematic of the Ethereum community: a group of semi-random people showed up to solve a technical problem and ended up build a community accordingly. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the network over the years!
One contributor, who everyone will agree gave his soul to the testnet, deserves a special mention: Afri Schoedon, thank you for the attention and love you gave to Görli!
(1) The dual deadline approach was chosen to give customer teams time to deploy a fix to Goerli in case a bug with the network upgrade was detected late in the deployment process.
Cover image originally from Boris Niehaus on Wikipediaand adapted by Tomo Saito.
