The launch of the Holesky testnet, planned to be the largest testnet on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, has been delayed due to a configuration error. Initially scheduled for 15 September, the launch has been pushed back to next week. What happened
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Holesky Ethereum testnet fails at launch
Holesky, set to be the most important testnet on the Ethereum blockchain (ETH), has seen its first launch disrupted. Scheduled to be up and running on 15 September, The Merge’s birthday, a configuration error ultimately forced Ethereum’s developers to push back the deadline.
According to Diederik Loerakker, who works on research and development for the Ethereum blockchain, one of the developers of the eponymous blockchain actually entered the wrong data in the genesis file. What’s more, other parameters would appear to be incompatible with the launch of the Holesky testnet:
Someone put 0x686f77206d7563682069732074686520666973683f (“how much is the fish?”) as extra-data in the EL Holesky genesis.json, and not in the CL genesis.ssz
Misconfiguration, network failed to launch.
Also, some other fork params in releases are rumored to mismatch too.
Need…
– proto.eth (@protolambda) September 15, 2023
According to the explorer beaconcha.in, the launch of the Holesky testnet was able to be initiated after some validators were able to fix the problem manually on their side, but this was not enough to finalise its launch.
As confirmed by Nethermind, a company specialising in the development of the blockchain ecosystem, the Ethereum Foundation and client providers have agreed to postpone the launch of Holesky until next week:
Holesky launch update!
Due to a misconfiguration in the ExtraData field (applied to EL configs but not to CL ones), Holesky didn’t initiate properly.
A consensus has been reached among the EF DevOps and client teams to relaunch a week from now.
– Nethermind (@NethermindEth) September 15, 2023
Planned to replace the Goerli testnet, Holesky should be operational until 2028 and could host 1.4 million validators, almost double the number currently on its parent blockchain Ethereum. For its launch, Holesky will be fed with 1.6 billion tokens, of course without any real value.
Like the networks on which they are deployed, testnet’s tokens serve only to carry out tests to reproduce the Ethereum environment. As such, the layer 1 blockchain is completely unaffected by the failure of the Holesky launch, which is why the fact that the testnet launch failed is not so serious in itself.
Other testnets exist, each with its own specific features: in the case of Sepolia, for example, it is designed to host decentralised applications (dApps). Holesky, like Goerli, is intended as a test network for staking, infrastructure development and developer protocols.
