Ethereum’s Holesky testnet regains finality after weeks of disruption amid Pectra testing

Holesky, one of Ethereum's two main testnet networks, has finally regained finality after nearly two weeks of non-finalization since developers activated Pectra on it.

On Monday, with over two-thirds of validators participating, Holesky gained finality at Epoch 119090, which took place at around 3 p.m. ET.

Finality ensures that transactions are permanently confirmed and irreversible, typically occurring within two epochs (13 minutes).

On Feb. 24, Ethereum’s Holesky testnet faced disruption during the Pectra upgrade testing, affecting Pectra research and fine-tuning. The issue was not related to Pectra itself but to a configuration bug impacting client software components.

After a couple of weeks of restoration efforts, Holesky's reaching finality was an important step toward recovery. Ongoing efforts are now focused on ensuring node stability as they prune old states and fully return online. This will help developers use the testnet again for Pectra.

Besides Holesky, developers also deployed Pectra on the other testnet, Sepolia . While Sepolia gained finality, it later ran into issues with a custom deposit contract, resulting in empty blocks.

Developers later found that the issue persisted due to an attacker exploiting an edge case. In this instance, the attacker sent zero token transfers to the deposit contract, triggering the issue, noted Marius Van Der Wijden. After about six hours, a hotfix was deployed, with client teams coordinating to fix the problem.

The upcoming Pectra upgrade includes several improvements, such as enabling gas payments in tokens other than ETH, account abstraction, and increased staking limits.