Ethereum’s largest testnet, Holešky, will sunset as part of a planned shutdown and migration to the Hoodi testnet following several technical issues earlier in the year.
The foundation said Monday that Holešky will be shut down two weeks after the Fusaka upgrade is finalized on the network. The upgrade is proposed for sometime in the second half of September.
“After this, Holešky will no longer be supported by client, testing or infrastructure teams,” it said. While the exact date isn’t clear, Ethereum core developers are looking to launch Fusaka on mainnet in November — so it must happen well before then.
Holešky was launched in September 2023 and was tasked with testing staking infrastructure and validator operations.
“The network served its purpose, enabling thousands of validators to test protocol upgrades, including the Dencun network upgrade and most recently, Pectra,” the foundation said.
The move reflects the Ethereum community’s commitment to improving every network layer. While decentralization through staking and scalability have long been priorities, the foundation recently touted UX as one of Ethereum’s highest leverage opportunities over the next six to 12 months.
Hoodi steps in for Holešky
While Holešky reached its “planned end-of-life date,” it saw “extensive inactivity leaks” in early 2025, resulting in a large exit queue. While it eventually recovered, the foundation launched Hoodi in March to provide a fresh testing environment free of those issues.
The foundation said one of the next steps is to migrate all of Holešky’s staking operators and infrastructure to Hoodi, which already supports the Pectra update and will activate future protocol upgrades, including the upcoming Fusaka fork.
The Ethereum Foundation recommended switching to Sepolia as the “recommended testnet” for smart contract and decentralized app testing for now.
Fusaka is still set for late 2025
Ethereum’s next significant hard fork is Fusaka — Fulu-Osaka — which is scheduled for early November and looks to improve how rollups access data by distributing data availability workloads more efficiently across network validators.
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This change could make running nodes easier, improve network decentralization and boost layer-2 scalability as rollups can process transactions faster and at lower cost. Fusaka will consist of 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals.
Glamsterdam on track for 2026
The Glamsterdam upgrade under EIP-7782 is slated for sometime in 2026 and is expected to include a proposal seeking to halve block times to 6 seconds.
The proposal would seek to separate block validation from execution to give provers more time to craft zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine proofs, Ladislaus from the foundation’s protocol coordination team told Cointelegraph in late July.
Ethereum’s recent developments are also showing market impact, as several publicly listed companies have established Ether (ETH) treasuries in recent months — a primary catalyst behind ETH’s more than 200% price rally since April.
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