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Ethereum test tokens being wildly speculated! "Fake Bored Ape" fetches 45 ETH; Ethereum developers: New testnet to be launched

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Ethereum test tokens being wildly speculated! "Fake Bored Ape" fetches 45 ETH; Ethereum developers: New testnet to be launched

The LayerZero Labs team launched the " Testnet Cross-Chain Bridge " last Wednesday, allowing users to cross-chain their mainnet ETH to the Goerli testnet to address the issue of developers testing tokens. However, since this mechanism gave value to test tokens, it sparked a frenzy of speculation, prompting Ethereum developers to step in and address the issue.

Pre-reading: Fake money turning into real cash? Ethereum testnet tokens can be cross-chained to the mainnet! Is it profitable? Why is the community against it?

The Serious Issue of Goerli Testnet Token Speculation

As the cross-chain bridge was launched on the testnet, the community's evaluation of this protocol varied. While this feature has brought efficiency and convenience to developers to some extent, many community users believe that the testnet, as a "public good," should be completely free.

Despite the meager benefits, profit-driven individuals can cause trouble to the testnet ecosystem through bots if there is a profitable opportunity.

Within just one week, concerns about testnet token speculation have surfaced in the community. Originally, 1 mainnet ETH could be exchanged for about 20,000 gETH Goerli ETH, but now it can only be exchanged for 4,400 gETH, with gETH seeing a weekly increase of about 450%.

Furthermore, the speculation surrounding gETH has spread to the NFT market, with the current lowest price of BAYC on the OpenSea testnet being 45gETH, compared to only 1.5gETH two days ago, representing an increase of about 23.7 times. The growth in terms of trading volume, number of transactions, and price is quite remarkable.

Response from Ethereum Core Developers on How to Address Current Testnet Issues

Even before the community's concerns about test tokens being speculated arose, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko engaged in discussions with the community on Twitter about how to make it easy for developers to obtain testnet ETH and how to allow major projects to transition to a new testnet while maintaining composability.

To these questions, Tim Beiko provided two suggestions:

  1. Add the ETH addresses of every contract deployed on the mainnet, Goerli, and Sepolia testnets to the Genesis File and allocate test tokens to them.
  2. Coordinate with major contract and infrastructure developers to launch on the testnet after the genesis block is generated.

Additionally, Tim Beiko mentioned that a new testnet called Holešky will be launched this year, as it is easier to launch a testnet with better initial conditions than to fix existing ones.

If the above suggestions can effectively address the issues with the old testnets, the new testnet will provide developers with a more friendly testing environment.

Furthermore, Tim Beiko also officially announced on Twitter today that the Goerli testnet will eventually be shut down, and future testnets, including the current Sepolia testnet, will be able to mint more tokens. He also hopes that more addresses can join the Genesis File of the new testnet.