Taiko Alpha-1 Testnet is Live

December 27th, 2022

Today, the Taiko Alpha-1 testnet (a1) is live - our first public testnet! We’ve codenamed this testnet, Snæfellsjökull. Be on the lookout for other Icelandic volcano releases as we approach mainnet over 2023! 🌋

We’re thrilled to reach this milestone towards our Type-1 ZK-EVM, with the ultimate goal of scaling Ethereum in a manner that is as secure and seamless for developers and users as possible. We still have a long way to go, but we hope you will join us in using and testing our first public testnet release.

If you want to jump right in, you can head to the testnet guide here:

If you want to learn more about what is in this release, and what is not, read on.

https://taiko.xyz/docs/category/alpha-1-testnet-guide

Taiko has been committed to building in the open, and our GitHub has reflected this for some time with everything being open source. In that vein, this first public testnet is as open as we can make it. It is open to all developers to deploy contracts on, all users to test out, and all willing participants to run an L2 node and propose blocks.

About the Taiko Alpha-1 testnet (Snæfellsjökull)

Open to all developers to deploy smart contracts. As Taiko aims to be a type-1 ZK-EVM (Ethereum-equivalent), you can use all the Ethereum/solidity tooling you know and love.
Open to all users who want to use it and play around with some transactions.
Open to all interested parties to run an L2 node, including as a proposer! Taiko will be running some nodes and proposing blocks, and we hope you will join us.
The L1 environment is a private Ethereum PoA fork that Taiko runs (testnet L1).
Faucet for requesting ETH and a sample ERC20 token on Taiko testnet L2 and L1.
Bridge to move assets between testnet L2 and L1.
Block explorers to view assets and activity on testnet L2 and L1.

What is not in this testnet

Ability to become a prover. You cannot extend your node into a prover.
Validity proofs. There will be no ZKPs generated in this testnet release.
Pre-deployed dapps. Bridging between L2 and L1 and transferring ETH or ERC20 to friends are the only supported user actions out-of-the-box. Any developer can deploy their smart contract or dapp, though, making it available to all users.

Get involved

Once more, here is the testnet guide where you can find documentation and links to all relevant apps/tools for testnet usage:

Besides deploying, using, and running, there are plenty of other ways you can get involved and help Taiko improve. This may include:

Creating tutorials or other content that can help developers and users get started.

Hearing from you all is the reason we have been keen to release this testnet as early as possible. On that note, we will have our first-ever community call on Thursday, December 29th at 15:00 UTC on our Discord server. You can find the call channel here and signal your interest to join. We will be providing general updates, but also invite questions in AMA style. Please ask any questions you would like in the “community-call-questions” Discord channel in advance.

We also want to commemorate this moment on Snæfellsjökull with all of you 🙂. As a result, we will be minting a POAP for all users of the testnet prior to ~~January 31st 23:59 UTC~~ January 5th 23:59 UTC. Any user with a bridging transaction + one other type of transaction (transfer, dapp tx) will receive one. They will be issued in the month of February.

Edit: Due to unexpectedly high network usage and to protect the integrity of the POAP participation program, we had to modify the end date from what was originally mentioned on this blog post.

Thank you

Finally, we want to say a sincere thank you. We have tons of people to thank, as this journey has been a year in the making or longer for some. We will specifically thank the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy & Scaling Exploration team for their ZK-EVM work, along with all contributors to that effort. We thank the incredible Taiko community and our early supporters who have contributed from the beginning, and of course the broader Ethereum community who have done the same.