Keeping the Kovan Testnet Alive — Ethereum’s Fastest testbed

The lab10 collective has used the Kovan testnet as its preferred choice to test bridges and various smart contracts. It is one of the first publicly accessible Proof of Authority (PoA) blockchains for Ethereum, to aid the developer community. We consider Kovan as one of the best testnets that works fast and is integrated into many ethereum eco-system tools. It is a perfect testbed to quickly iterate and experiment. Given our work on the ARTIS blockchain these qualities make it an integral part of our staging environment.

Validator Consortium

When Parity announced the end of the their support of the Kovan testnet we were convinced that the story cannot end here and it seems we were not the only ones to think so. POA Network stepped up and organized a pool of 4 validators to come together and support the network further. Consequently a pull request has been conducted. The validator pool will consist of the POA Network, Polymath Network, Peppersec and lab10 collectiverespectively. All participants have committed to keep this network alive, follow all necessary upgrades and promote it as a decisive testnet within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Successful Fork

Today on 15th of May at block number 10960500 the fork of the Kovan testnet has been executed. All nodes have been up and synchronized and we are happy to confirm that the Kovan validator switching went smoothly. The lab10 collective’s switch can be witnessed here with the validator key 0x596e8221a30bfe6e7eff67fee664a01c73ba3c56.

Let’s Keep BUIDL-ing

We’re very excited about this new chapter and to support this outstanding Ethereum testnet. It is in fact the fastest Ethereum testnet with 4 second block times. We are looking forward to see innovation finding its way from Kovan over to the Ethereum mainnet. Feel free to start developing and testing your dApps on the Kovan network from this point forward.

Some useful links collected from our friends at POA Network to get you started:

• Blockchain explorer for the Kovan network hosted on BlockScout. Alternatively, you can use Etherscan.
• Public RPC endpoint. Should be used to connect a DApp or a Wallet to the network: https://kovan.infura.io 2 or https://kovan.poa.network
• Chain spec 2 files and list of known bootnodes 2.
• Other network-specific addresses: https://github.com/poanetwork/poa-chain-spec/tree/kovan 1
• Faucet: https://gitter.im/kovan-testnet/faucet 1
• Network stat:https://kovan-netstat.poa.network 1
• Governance DApps: To use governance dapps please switch to Kovan network in your Nifty Wallet / MetaMask.
• List of Kovan Validators and their keys: https://validators.poa.network/ 2
• Ballots and governance: https://voting.poa.network/

General network information: