⚙️ ETH devs plan to launch a new testnet to solve ETH scarcity on test networks

⚙️ ETH devs plan to launch a new testnet to solve ETH scarcity on test networks 🔒 French police arrest suspects of Platypus Finance hack 🥱 SOL experiences a prolonged outage (again) after an upgrade

GM, frens.

It's the third week of our TG community event, this time we're rewarding the creative ones out there! 🎨 Create an image that can be used as a sticker in the VEMP TG, tag us and include the hashtag #CompoundVEMP. The best one will receive an exclusive NFT 🖼️ as a prize for our final week! Show us your creative side and share your work with the VEMP fam.

Now, for what's been happening in the space lately:

⚙️ ETH devs plan to launch a new testnet to solve ETH scarcity on test networks

🔒 French police arrest suspects of Platypus Finance hack

🥱 SOL experiences a prolonged outage (again) after an upgrade

ETH devs plan to launch a new testnet to solve ETH scarcity on test networks

ETH devs are planning to launch a new testnet called Holli to make it easier for developers and node operators to test out Ethereum applications. Holli will aim to address the issue of acquiring ETH on test networks as well as other testing challenges.

Even though it's testnet it's still a real chain so the whole economy applies here, as a result test ETH became scarce which led to some difficulties and weird scenarios like some services selling the free testnet ETH for real world money.

That isn't great, obviously, so when creating a new testnet devs will think of ways to get around that, one of the proposals was to just airdrop the test ETH automatically to all the addresses that have ever deployed smart contracts on either Ethereum mainnet or any of ETH testnets. And you thought devs had it easy?

French police arrest suspects of Platypus Finance hack

We've mentioned Platypus Finance getting hacked last week, so now it turns out that the French police have arrested two people who are suspected of being involved in the attack. The project was able to locate and trace the attackers back to a Binance account verified by KYC.

The two people were arrested thanks to the assistance of Platypus Finance, ZachXBT, an on-chain analyst, and Binance. The French police have since taken the two suspects into custody, and the project has been actively working to recover the stolen funds. And though nothing beyond that has been revealed, it's a reassuring sign that the guys behind the hack are about to face justice.

SOL experiences a prolonged outage (again) after an upgrade

Solana was down several times again during the weekend while engineers worked to identify and address the issue. The issues began on Feb. 25 after the network *successfully* completed its upgrade to version 1.14. Unfortunately, this upgrade caused block finalization issues and slowed down transaction speeds.

The initial attempts to fix the issue was unsuccessful, leaving the network down and users unable to process transactions. It took almost 24 hours to restore the chain to full operation this time, which is substantially longer than the 12 hours Solana experienced in October.

The problems have led to renewed criticism of the network, with many pointing to the lack of reliability as a major flaw. The network being down did not change the price of SOL, the native token of the chain but it did impact users who could not use the chain for extended periods of time.