ConsenSys: A Brief History of Ethereum Testing Network

Disclaimer: This article aims to convey more market information and does not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the author's viewpoint and does not represent the official stance of Mars Finance

Disclaimer: This article aims to convey more market information and does not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the author's viewpoint and does not represent the official stance of Mars Finance.

Editor: Remember to follow me

Source: ForelightNews

The test network is an alternative network to simulate the blockchain main network, created to test and experiment with the functionality of the main network blockchain, in order to reduce errors in actual operation, such as the loss of real funds. These blockchain test networks can be compared to the "simulation environment" in traditional Web development. Developers can debug protocol upgrades and smart contracts in the test network, and then deploy them to the main network.

Based on the similarity between these networks and the main network, some test networks use the same underlying technologies and consensus mechanisms as the main network, while others use different technologies and consensus mechanisms from the main network. An important difference to note is that tokens obtained from the testing network have no economic value.

Olympic Test Network - Early 2015

The first public Ethereum testing network in history is called Olympic and was released before the official launch of the Ethereum main network. Olympic test network is a proof-of-work test network, which is intended to conduct the ninth and final test before the official public release of the main network of Ethereum.

The Olympic testing network attempts to push the testing network to its limit by incentivizing application developers, data providers, and exchanges to send high-volume transactions and conducting stress testing on the network.

The Olympic test network is called Ethereum 0.9 with a network ID of 0. After the successful public release of the Ethereum main network, it ceased in July 2015.

Morden Test Network - July 2015

After the launch of the Ethereum public main network, a new public testing network is needed to work hand in hand with the main network. So Morden test network, another proof-of-work proves that the test network was born.

The ID of this network is 2, and it was the only Ethereum test network for over a year before it was abandoned in November 2016. The Morden testing network is mainly used to test the garbage data between the two main Ethereum clients Geth and Parity, as well as some consensus issues that only test the network.

Although the Morden network has been abandoned by the Ethereum team, it is still active in the Ethereum Classic community and has been renamed the Morden Classic test network.

Ropesten Test Network - November 2016

Ropsten is the third and last proof-of-work test network of Ethereum. It was launched after the main network upgrade, and this new testing network is named after a subway station in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Ropesten testing network supports all major Ethereum clients and is the only available proof of work consensus mechanism testing network.

In February 2017, the Ropesten testing network suffered a serious denial of service attack. This attack caused network speed to slow down and consumed excessive disk space, making it difficult for Ethereum clients to synchronize with the Ropesten network. At the same time, gradually increasing the gas limit from 4.7 million to approximately 9 billion, every time a large transaction is sent, it will cause network paralysis and generate a large number of garbage blocks.

The Ropesten team successfully restored the network in March 2017 through community donated GPU hash computing power, clearing all garbage blocks accumulated due to the attack.

Kovan Test Network - March 2017

The attack on the Ropesten test network in February 2017 led to the birth of several other test networks.

The Kovan test network was created by the Parity team. Kovan, like other test networks launched after an attack, was born primarily to meet the needs of developers to test their applications on a stable and client compatible test network.

The Kovan testing network uses an authoritative proof of consensus mechanism, which sacrifices decentralization by maintaining a small number of trusted signers and validators to ensure security. These signers and validators create new blocks in the network by pledging their reputation.

As the identities of these validators are known, in order to protect their reputation, they will actively maintain the network.

Like Ropesten, the Kovan testing network is named after a subway station in Singapore. Its network ID is 42, and creating a new block takes approximately 4 seconds. The testing network did not receive support from some major Ethereum clients (such as Geth) and cannot fully reproduce the current production environment (PoW main network).

Although the Kovan testing network is a more stable and faster testing environment compared to the Ropesten testing network, as it does not require CPU intensive mining to maintain the network, many in the industry still believe that it is:

1. An elegant solution because Ethereum should have a dynamic block restriction.
2. It is not portable because other clients need to implement new fork logic themselves.
3. Incompatible with synchronization mode

The Kovan network is still active today and is still the favorite testing network for many teams in the community.

Rinkeby Test Network - April 2017

Due to the rapid launch of the Kovan test network due to the Ropesten attack, the Ethereum team created the Rinkeby test network as a long-term solution using CliquePOA (authoritative certification).

This network is also named after a subway station in Stockholm, with a network ID of 4 and a 15 second interval between exits.

The new authoritative proof network is easy to implement and embed into any Ethereum client. It also allows the use of existing synchronization technologies such as Fast, Light, and Warp without the need for client developers to add custom logic to the application.

It will maintain a list of trusted signers over time by:

1. Firstly, the 32 byte "extra data" field in the block header is reused to store the 65 byte field of the secp256k1 signature, allowing anyone who obtains the block to verify it based on the authorized signer list. This means that the 'miner' part of the block header is outdated.

During the block processing process, any synchronous chain client can count votes, thereby maintaining a dynamically changing list of authorized signers through public voting.

Despite the Ethereum team's efforts to create a standard authoritative certification protocol, Rinkeby only received support from Geth Ethereum clients, leaving room for the creation of another testing network that is supported by all major clients.

Gorli Test Network - September 2018

As a hackathon project, the test network was launched by Chainsafe team on ETHPerli. It attempts to achieve its functionality by rewriting Parity's AuraProof of Authority consensus mechanism (mainly written in Rust) through the Go language.

When AfriScohedon teamed up with the Chainsafe team to create the "next generation" PoA public testing network, it became an official project. This network is compatible with all major Ethereum clients, including Geth, Parity, Hyperledger Besu, Nethermind, and more.

The early steps taken by the team include:

1. Fully specify authoritative proof engines such as Aura or Clique in the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-225).
2. Implement one or more of these engines on different clients.
3. Based on the available implementation conditions of the simulated main network, a simple new authoritative proof test network is introduced.

Through these steps, the Gorli network was successfully launched in early 2019. To this day, it is still the only authoritative proof network that can ensure consistent availability.

The network ID of the Gorli network is 5, the chain ID is 5, and the average block out time is 15 seconds. Its status dashboard and resource manager can be viewed in the link.

Final thoughts on the history of the testing network

There are many available Ethereum testing networks today, each attempting to solve unique problems left over by history. This article only covers the most popular and widely used testing networks, and there are currently some other networks with unique properties, such as Sokol.

Before deploying to the main network, someone may ask which option is the best for testing the application. The answer is that there is no 'best choice' because it actually depends on the functionality the team wants to test and the degree to which they need to test the network's similarity to the Ethereum main network. As part of its development process, most software teams choose and adhere to using one or more of these networks.