Ethereum testnet Holesky goes live on Merge anniversary

Ethereum has marked the first anniversary of The Merge today with the introduction of its latest testnet, Holesky.

Named after a Prague neighbourhood in the Czech Republic, Holesky is designed to be twice as big as the main network and will replace Goerli as the main testnet for staking, infrastructure and protocol development. 

The newest debut lands a year to the day when Ethereum finalised its long-awaited ‘Merge’ move to a ‘proof-of-stake’ model from the original ‘proof-of-work’ type that Bitcoin utilises.

The Merge is the name given to the original Ethereum Mainnet merging with a separate proof-of-stake blockchain called the Beacon Chain, which now exists as one chain.

The first blocks proposed on the new test network were viewable today on the website beaconcha.in, designed specifically to track Holesky.

Holesky, Goerli and Sepolia

Holesky joins Goerli and Sepolia as the third testnet on Ethereum. Reports today suggest that Goerli will be phased out in the first half of next year.

With Holesky, it’s also been reported that there is an expected provision of approximately 1.6 billion testnet ETH, allowing for developers to minimise issues when procuring testnet ETH on current networks, thus easing the testing of Ethereum smart contracts on Holesky.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Ethereum core developer Parithosh Jayanthi had said: “We don’t want to hit a scaling issue that could happen first on mainnet. We want to catch [scaling issues] on testnet, which means we have to have a testnet that’s bigger.”

ETH price

At the time of writing, the price of market’s second-largest crypto is trading at $1,619.40 – down 0.99% in the past 24 hours.

ETH’s trading volume is also in the red, at a drop of 25.69%. Ethereum’s all-time high was reached on 16 November 2021 when it hit $4,891.70, while its all-time low was eight years ago when it dipped to $0.4209 on 21 October 2015. Its market cap currently stands at $194.7billion.

At the moment, ETH sits on 3,151,424 watchlists, according to CoinMarketCap.