Why is this the case though? Because If I’m developing on many of the other chains, there’s just 1 testnet for devs, and its always available, it’s easy to get gas/native tokens, and its always the place to go to develop applications.
- Polygon: Mumbai
- Avalanche: Fuji
- Solana: Devnet
- BSC: BSC Testnet
I’d like to echo the sentiments from @noam. From an application perspective, having to migrate to a new network every few years is a large burden on both developers and application/infra owners.
As Ethereum continues to grow and gain adoption and more developers, I feel more focus should be placed on DX (developer experience)
Right now, here is what IMO is the best developer experience regarding testnets:
- There should be one, and only one testnet for developers. This network shouldn’t ever change (or not for a very long time)
- Network should run on POA so its not dependant on stake or community validators, & have the ability to mint lots of ETH (or infinite). There should always be 0 demand for OTC testnet ETH
- This testnet should have all the major applications & infra (alchemy, opensea, chainlink, the graph etc)
- Network clients should be upgradeable over time rather than spinning up a new testnet
Right now it’s really hard to get gETH, and gas prices can spike which means what little ETH devs have gets chewed up. I feel with these issues more and more devs will likely turn to L2’s and other EVM chains to develop their applications (Polygon, BSC, Avalanche Fuji etc). We recently had to turn off our ETH faucet due to someone getting around our security measures and taking it to sell it OTC