Ephemeral Testnet

⚠️ Ephemery testnet is forking to Deneb starting from iteration 111 on January 18 2024. Make sure your clients are updated to latest releases supporting it.

The objective of this effort is to create the first automatically reset ephemeral Ethereum testnet which would serve as a cross-client testing network without issues stemming from a long-term running history.

Proposal

An ephemeral testnet is a single network that rolls back to the genesis after a set period of time. This kind of network is focused on short term and heavy testing usecases. The purpose of this is also to avoid problems like insufficient testnet funds, inactive validators, state bloat, and similar issues faced by long-running testnets.

More resources:

Meta, network info

	Current value
Network ID
Iteration number
Rollback period	7 days
Next rollback

Landing page

https://ephemery.dev/ (add RPC with single click)

RPC providers

https://rpc.bordel.wtf/test (geth)
https://otter.bordel.wtf/erigon
https://eth.ephemeral.zeus.fyi (lighthouse-geth, full beacon)

Faucets

Block explorers

Beacon explorers

Checkpoint sync endpoints

Validators

Run a node

At this moment, official client releases don't include predefined Ephemery testnet. To connect the client to Ephemery network, it has to be done manualy.

Download latest Ephemery parameters from its release and point your client to it like with any custom network.

wget https://github.com/ephemery-testnet/ephemery-genesis/releases/download/ephemery-111/testnet-all.tar.gz
mkdir ephemery && tar -xzf testnet-all.tar.gz -C ephemery

Example setup for geth and lighthouse. First initialize geth genesis and then run clients with configuration pointing to downloaded testnet files and variables:

geth --datadir geth-ephemery init ephemery/genesis.json 
source ephemery/nodevars_env.txt
geth --datadir geth-ephemery --authrpc.jwtsecret=/tmp/jwt --bootnodes $BOOTNODE_ENODE 
lighthouse bn -t ephemery --execution-endpoint http://localhost:8551 --execution-jwt=/tmp/jwt --boot-nodes=$BOOTNODE_ENR_LIST

Lodestar supports Ephemery natively without extra arguments. Docker setups, services and more deployment options can be found in Ephemery scripts repo.

Resources and contributing

The network is currently in its early stages, it runs as a small network with a manual reset mechanism. Each reset changes network parameters and requires a new genesis. Setup and reset mechanism is coordinated via this repository. Each release contains values for the new release.

To run a node and participate in the network, use setup from this repository. There are various deployment options, you can either use a Docker setup, cloud-init script or manually modify the retention.sh script to suit your system and run it as a cron job. There are also instructions for manually setting up a node.

Checkout current version of specs for client implementation and feel free to provide feedback.

Contribute

Contribute by participating in the network and identifying issues caused by the ephemeral setup. You can help a lot by testing features and infrastracture which might break during the reset. Here are few ideas for general testing:

Run a node, especially client which is not tested yet
Add validators, monitor attestations, proposed blocks, slashing issues
Use your wallet, find out how it behaves after the reset, how it handles different network ID from same RPC
Deploy dapps, try your favorite developer tooling
Run infrastracture, explorers, etc
Reach out with your own ideas for testing

Feel free to open issue in this repository with your findings and ideas. And feel free to join the discussion in Matrix room.

Roadmap

Ephemeral testnet needs a lot of research and development to be stable and widely usable. Here is a simple roadmap overview, for details on current tasks, check the tracking issue.

remyroy/ephemery-resources