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Ethereum core developers have decided to create a third testnet, Hoodi, to better prepare for the Pectra upgrade, which has now been delayed until at least late April after the first two testnets encountered several bugs.

The Hoodi testnet will launch on March 17 and the Pectra upgrade for it will be activated on March 26, Ethereum Foundation developer Tim Beiko said following the Ethereum All Core Dev Call on March 13.

If Pectra runs smoothly on Hoodi without major issues, core developers could set a mainnet launch date for Pectra as soon as 30 days after Hoodi’s activation, Beiko said.

That would mean Pectra could go live on Ethereum mainnet as early as April 25.

Tim Beiko’s latest announcement on the Pectra upgrade: Ethereum Magicians

Pectra, which combines features from the Prague and Electra proposals, will implement over 10 Ethereum Improvement Proposals mostly aimed at bringing more functionality to Ethereum wallets and improving user experience.

It will also include scaling proposals to double the blob count for data availability from three to six.

Pectra was initially slated to launch on Ethereum mainnet in late 2024 but has faced repeated delays due to client readiness issues and synchronization bugs in the first two Ethereum testnets, Holesky and Sepolia.

Pectra was rolled out on Sepolia on March 5, but soon after, Ethereum developers started seeing error messages on their geth nodes and empty blocks being mined.

Galaxy Digital vice president of research Christine Kim said Hoodi would look to “mimic” the Ethereum mainnet as closely as possible by launching a validator set similar to how mainnet currently operates.

That would see at least 20 million test staked-Ether (ETH) distributed across 11 client teams and five staking operators.

Source: Christine Kim

Beiko noted that aspects of Pectra may still be tested on Sepolia and Holesky.

Related: Ethereum average gas fees drop 95% one year after the Dencun upgrade

The third testnet comes as Ethereum core developers agreed to deploy future Ethereum protocol upgrades at a faster cadence during an “All Core Devs” meeting on Feb. 13.

Crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm also called on Ethereum core developers to ship faster protocol updates to achieve more milestones on its technical roadmap and maintain its competitive edge as a leading layer 1 blockchain.

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