Traders Speculate on Goerli Even as Ethereum Devs Move On

The Goerli testnet may have given way to a new one, but that hasn’t stopped traders from speculating on the price of Goerli ETH.

On Sunday, Polygon’s Mudit Gupta flagged that GoETH were trading for $0.69 each. Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap, shared data showing that users traded $1.5M worth of GoETH over 24 hours.

This despite the fact that Ethereum’s devs are transitioning away from the Goerli network to a new testnet called Holli.

“Testnet Ether is supposed to be free but is being marked up by speculators,” Gupta said. “Keyboard warriors will tell you that the developers are buying it but no, they are not. Maye 0.1% are buying for consumption.”

Experiment With Code

Goerli is a testnet used by developers to experiment with code before launching to the public on the Ethereum mainnet. GoETH is used to pay for transactions of the testnet.
GoETH was initially freely distributed to users via “faucets,” websites that issue coins to users without charge. However, developers resorted to purchasing testnet coins amid a shortage last year. Without GoETH, devs cannot experiment on the test network, posing a threat to innovation on the Ethereum blockchain.

Gupta launched a faucet that distributed 6M GoETH for free. The coins he distributed would be worth $4M at current prices.

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Denali Marsh, a blockchain engineer for Kava Labs, said he bought 10 GoETH for testing last week.
“I tried every faucet including yours, but swapping was the only way to get the amount I needed quickly,” Marsh tweeted. “Speculation on public utilities is gross but the market drives solutions.”

Gupta replied that monetizing testnet coins offers a short-term solution, but lamented that people have not invested the same resources into solving the underlying problem they’ve spent on devising methods to profit from it.

The GoETH speculation comes despite Ethereum’s devs making plans to abandon the test network. “Y’all know [Goerli is] deprecated and soon to be fully unsupported testnet right?” Adams tweeted.

Different Strategies

On Feb 24, Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation confirmed that a new testnet, Holli, will launch later this year to replace Goerli.

“Over the years, application developers’ usage of testnets grew exponentially,” Beiko said. “The distribution methods for GoETH (informal allocations + easy-to-game faucets) became less and less reliable, leading to the current issues around acquiring GoETH.”
Beiko said Ethereum’s devs are considering different strategies for issuing test tokens on Holli, urging community members to reach out with suggestions.

“It’s really hard to fix live testnets, but fairly easy to set up the next ones with better starting conditions,” Beiko said. “If you have strong opinions about this, now’s a good time to make them heard.”