Ethereum’s New Holesky Testnet Delayed After Launch Failure

The deployment of Ethereum’s new Holesky testnet has been pushed back by one to two weeks. On Sept. 15, Nethermind, an Ethereum client team, tweeted that an execution layer misconfiguration was the culprit for Holesky’s failed launch.

Nethermind said a relaunch would likely take place in one week’s time, suggesting Holesky could go live as early as this Friday. However, Barnabus Busa, a DevOps engineer for the Ethereum Foundation, published a GitHub pull request suggesting the relaunch should occur on September 28.

“It's extremely likely that we relaunch the network with new genesis files and have the network up ~two weeks from now,” said Paritosh, an Ethereum foundation DevOps engineer.

Holesky is set to replace Ethereum’s Goerli testnet, which is scheduled to be deprecated next year. Goerli is Ethereum’s longest-running testnet, having launched in 2018. However, since 2022, Goerli has suffered from a shortage of its network token, Goerli ETH (GETH), with developers resorting to purchasing GETH on the open market just to experiment with their code.

GETH is freely distributed in small quantities via faucets, but rocketing demand and network activity gave rise to a market for the testnet token. GETH was changing hands for $0.69 on Feb. 28 and drove more than $1.5M in daily trade volume, drawing criticism from the Ethereum community. GETH last traded for $0.04, according to CoinGecko.

Last month, Ethereum developers decided to mint 1.6B Holesky ETH tokens for the new testnet after determining the network could support 1.4M validators. Holesky is planned to operate until 2028.