Ethereum's new Testnet, Hoodi, has been launched and will activate the Pectra network upgrade on March 26th.

BlockBeats News, March 19th. The Ethereum Foundation has released an article stating that the activation of the Pectra testnet has exposed issues with client configurations in the deposit contract on the Ethereum testnet. While Sepolia's recovery process was relatively straightforward and the network has now fully recovered, Holesky experienced a significant non-activeness leak in its recovery mechanism.

The Holesky network has since been finalized, but exiting validators will take approximately a year to be fully removed from the validator set. While stakers can test deposits, merges, and all other Pectra features, the scale of the exit queue has made it impractical for Holesky to test the full validator lifecycle within a reasonable timeframe.

To address this issue, a new testnet called Hoodi has been launched. Hoodi will activate the Pectra network upgrade in the 2048th epoch (Wednesday, March 26, 2025, at 07:37:12 UTC). In the future, staking operators and infrastructure providers should use Hoodi for validator testing. To allow for migration time, the Holesky testnet will be supported until September 2025. Apart from validator exits, all other Pectra features are still available for testing on Holesky.