[Action Required] Kovan to Goerli migration is underway, and what that means for you

[Optimism Announcements]

The Kovan testnet has been deprecated by the Ethereum community, with only two validators remaining. To avoid disruptions on a network that is no longer actively maintained, we’ve started the process of migrating our testnet from Kovan to Goerli. As mainnet changes, Kovan is going to start falling behind, and we want to ensure the network we’re testing on stays in sync with testnet changes post-merge.

The migration to Goerli is a multi-phase transition and the first wave is currently underway. Since we are deprecating our Kovan testnet soon, we recommend that oracles, nodes, infrastructure providers, wallets, and developer tools start migrating as soon as today. By starting migration now, these infrastructure projects will lay the foundation to enable the rest of the ecosystem to migrate on top of them.

Subsequent phases are dependent on infrastructure providers to be fully migrated, and major providers including Alchemy, QuickNode, and Infura have added support for the Optimism Goerli network. We’re aiming for all projects to be completely migrated to Goerli by August 15th. We also recommend keeping Optimism Kovan running in the meantime, as users in the following phases will need time to fully migrate. It’s also worth noting that feature-full block explorers aren’t yet live on Goerli. In the meantime, there is a lightweight explorer you can use to search the chain.

To sync an Optimism Goerli replica, please use the configuration values defined in our Infra Provider Goerli Migration Guide. You can follow along with the ecosystem’s migration progress in our documentation, and track the uptime of the Goerli testnet at status.optimism.io. If you have questions, reach out in the #kovan-to-goerli-migration channel in Discord.

Goerli will provide our ecosystem with a stable network to test on that will remain in sync with any mainnet Ethereum changes post-merge. We know migrating to a new network takes time and effort, and we appreciate our community taking this important step!