Polkadot's testnet restarts on a new relay chain at half the operating cost
Victoria Shinder2 min readThe team that runs the Polkadot Testnet, Paseo, published its report for the third quarter on 30 October. Its main event was a restart: the relay chain began again from block 0 on a smaller footprint, as planned in the funding proposal approved as referendum 1919, while Asset Hub and the People chain kept their state and a Bulletin chain joined as a system chain.
The numbers in the report show how much smaller. The active validator set went from 152 on the legacy relay on 1 July to 58 on the new one on 30 September, cores from 56 to 19, all of them assigned, and system chains from five to three. The infrastructure providers paid by the testnet's bounty fell from 27 to 22, running 76 nodes instead of 172, and the quarterly operating budget dropped from 196,250 USDC to 100,400 USDC, down 48.8%. The Collectives, Coretime and Bridge Hub chains were retired, and cores are now assigned directly on the relay chain, so an allocation stays in place without a sale cycle to renew.
Teams moved across at one announced cutover on 6 July. Since then, the report says, the relay chain never went a minute without a block, its longest gap being 24 seconds, and every system chain stayed above the 99.5% availability target: Asset Hub 99.59%, People 99.75% and Bulletin 99.99%. Validators cast 97.5% of the 41.8 million backing votes assigned to them over the quarter.
The testnet hosts the Polkadot Products Devnet, Parity's staging chains and six community parachains. Runtimes are now released from Paseo's own repository on its own schedule rather than waiting for each Polkadot Fellowship release.
What it means
Halving the cost of a testnet while meeting its availability targets is a useful datapoint for any network that pays for shared infrastructure from community funds. For developers, the practical changes are a fresh relay chain, fewer system chains and runtimes that can arrive ahead of mainnet releases, which makes the testnet closer to a preview of upcoming features than a mirror of current ones.