# A way forward for Holesky Holesky has not been finalizing for a couple of days now. We need a healthy chain for staking pools to test their setups and it is pretty clear that it will take Holesky longer to finalize again. A solution to this is to do a shadowfork of holesky in order to allow staking pools to test on Pectra. Note that pools can not test their setups on Sepolia, since Sepolia uses a permissioned validator set. Since we are still collecting a lot of useful information from Holesky, we do not want client teams to stop their nodes over there. It is a good experiment to see what happens to the network when so many validators leak out or get mass-slashed. ## The Plan - We do a shadow fork of the chain before the Pectra fork, and gothrough the transition - The network would be run by PandaOps, with ~1.5M keys - We use the validator set of Holesky before the Pectra fork as the new genesis set and replace the public keys of all client teams with keys owned by PandaOps. - By doing so, client teams can focus on running their nodes on Holesky, while we get a stable network for pools to test. - Pool operators will be able to use their keys both on Holesky and on the new shadow fork. - client teams will be able to get the replaced keys later if they want from PandaOps ## Justification This plan addresses the need for a stable network to test for staking pools. It's also a quicker way for us to get something up to speed with meaningful state and transaction load than spinning up a new network. Keys are being replaced, so that client teams can fully focus on working on Holesky and do not need to spin up more infrastructure for the new network. ## Future Work This plan does not address what will or should happen to Holesky or this shadow fork after all of this resolves. It should just outline our idea to get pools up to speed on testing as quickly as possible.