Ethereum Foundation’s recent blog published on November 30, 2022 was about the Ropsten Shutdown Announcement. This announcement is followed by the previous Ropsten, Rinkeby & Kiln Deprecation Announcement released on June 21, 2022.
The Shut-down of Ropsten Testnet
According to the blog, “The Ropsten network has been deprecated and will be shut down in the coming weeks. Over the past few months, infrastructure providers have gradually stopped supporting the network and validator participation rates have been steadily declining.”
The blog also states “The vast majority of remaining validator nodes will be shut down during the December 15-31, 2022 period. After this, Ropsten will no longer be supported by client, testing or infrastructure teams.”
A Reminder
“The next testnet to be sunset is Rinkeby. The network will be live until mid-2023 to give users and application developers the chance to migrate to either Goerli or Sepolia. That said, Rinkeby does not support The Merge, nor will it support future network upgrades.” It must be noted that it is no longer a feature-equivalent replica of the Ethereum mainnet.
An Opportunity
As mentioned by the Ethereum Foundation, “The Merge and legacy testnet deprecations have provided an opportunity for the Ethereum community to rethink its broader approach to test networks. Proposals around purpose-specific networks for stakers vs. developers, end-of-life norms for testnets and more are being discussed on Ethereum Magicians and in community calls.”
In mid of 2023, Ethereum will also shut down its Rinkeby testnet, giving developers ample time to move over any applications they have running to the Goerli or Sepolia testnets.
Although all these testnets played crucial roles in development and testing prior to Ethereum’s massive Merge upgrade, when Ethereum transitioned from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
Goerli and Sepolia both ran through their own tests of the Merge, so they are the most similar to the environment that the Ethereum blockchain operates under today. As such, those testnets are expected to continue to operate.
The Ethereum developers consistently create testnets, depending on what upgrades they are trying to test. In the previous month, Ethereum developers agreed to go live with the Shandong testnet, which addresses some Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for the protocol’s next big upgrade, Shanghai.
Ethereum Price
The current trading price of Ethereum is $1,289.85 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $6.32 Billion USD. Ethereum is up 0.28% in the last 24 hours with the current CoinMarketCap ranking at 2, with a live market cap of $157.84 Billion USD.
And most recently, on December 01, 2022, Chainlink shared a tweet in which it added that “Chainlink Staking v0.1 launching on Ethereum mainnet on December 6th.”
Steve Anderson is an Australian crypto enthusiast. He is a specialist in management and trading for over 5 years. Steve has worked as a crypto trader, he loves learning about decentralisation, understanding the true potential of the blockchain.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/12/02/ethereum-foundation-update-ropsten-shutdown-is-shutting-down/