As previously announced, the Ropsten community has been deprecated and will likely be shut down within the coming weeks. Over the previous few months, infrastructure suppliers have steadily stopped supporting the community and validator participation charges have been steadily declining.
The overwhelming majority of remaining validator nodes will likely be shut down through the December 15-31, 2022 interval. After this, Ropsten will not be supported by shopper, testing or infrastructure groups.
As a reminder, the subsequent testnet to be sundown is Rinkeby. The community will likely be stay till mid-2023 to provide customers and software builders the possibility emigrate to both Goerli or Sepolia. That stated, Rinkeby doesn’t assist The Merge, nor will it assist future community upgrades. It’s not a feature-equivalent reproduction of the Ethereum mainnet.
The Merge and legacy testnet deprecations have supplied a possibility for the Ethereum neighborhood to rethink its broader strategy to check networks. Proposals round purpose-specific networks for stakers vs. builders, end-of-life norms for testnets and extra are being mentioned on Ethereum Magicians and in neighborhood calls. You probably have robust opinions about the way forward for Ethereum testnets, now’s the time to voice them!
Cowl picture by Micael Widell
