Ethereum Foundation Ends Ropsten Testnet Support

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The Ethereum Foundation announces the imminent closure of the Ropsten testnet and asks developers to move their applications to the Goerli or Sepolia testnets.

According to the announcement on the official blogEthereum Foundation, Ropsten will be discontinued and the vast majority of remaining validator nodes will be disabled from December 15 to December 31, 2022:

"Over the past few months, suppliersinfrastructures gradually stopped supporting the network, and the level of validator participation steadily declined. Therefore, Ropsten will no longer be supported by the customer, testing or infrastructure teams."

Ethereum Core Developer Tim Beikoconfirmed the closure of the Ropsten testnet and called on the developer community to participate in discussions about the approach to the future of all Ethereum testnets. For example, provide opinions and suggestions on target networks for stakers and developers, end-of-life standards for testnets, and much more.

The Ethereum Foundation team recalled that onQueue closing of the next test network, Rinkeby. It is no longer a functionally equivalent copy of the Ethereum mainnet, does not support merging, and will not support future network upgrades.

However, the Rinkeby test network will continue to operate until mid-2023 to give users and app developers the opportunity to smoothly migrate to the Goerli or Sepolia networks.

In June, Ethereum developers reported
about the successful transition of the Ropsten test network toProof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. As part of the testnet transition, the Ropsten chain, based on Proof-of-Work (PoW), and the Beacon Chain, which runs on Proof-of-Stake (PoS), merged.