Ethereum core developers plan to end support for the Holesky testnet in September 2025 — and are transitioning its role and preparing for its eventual deprecation. 

Deprecating testnets is common, with Ethereum developers previously discontinuing Kiln, Ropsten and Rinkeby in 2022 and Goerli last year.

Holesky, launched in September 2023, is one of the two main testnets for Ethereum, along with Sepolia. It has been a key public testnet for staking, infrastructure and protocol development.

The Holesky testnet faced disruption testing for the Pectra upgrade. After several weeks of restoration efforts, Holesky is now reaching finality — but the validator exit queue remains congested, limiting its use for specific community testing scenarios. Exiting validators will take about one year to leave the validator set fully, making validator exits for Pectra testing impractical on Holesky. However, other features remain supported, the Ethereum Foundation noted in a Tuesday blog post.

To address the situation, a new testnet, Hoodi, has been rolled out and will activate the Pectra network upgrade on March 26, ahead of the expected mainnet release in the second quarter. Moving forward, staking operators and infrastructure providers should use Hoodi for validator testing, the foundation added.

Developers have agreed to keep Holesky operational in the short term, potentially repurposing it as a core developer testnet for experiments such as gas limit increases and other protocol stress tests.

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