Rinkeby, the second proof-of-authority test network by the Ethereum developers that was launched after Kovan testnet will be deprecated soon. A pull request by Péter Szilágyi adding a warning for Rinkeby users has been merged to update the Go-Ethereum repo, making an official announcement to deprecate the testnet. .

Rinkeby testnet may still work, if maintained by the community but there will be no further hard-forks shipped for it by the Go-Ethereum team. If no community support is received, eventually the network will be permanently halted after other test networks transition through The Merge and proven to be stable enough.

FYI, deprecating Rinkeby does have a personal sting for me too. I spent an enormous amount of time monitoring and maintaining it. At some point I spend my last holiday night (from Italy) debugging Rinkeby via SSH on my phone. Still, it's time to clean up stuff. #Ethereum

— Péter Szilágyi (karalabe.eth) (@peter_szilagyi) May 16, 2022

Why deprecate Rinkeby Testnet?

Main reasons that contributed to the decision of Rinkeby getting deprecated are considered to be

• centralization around Go-Ethereum team
• less community support
• complex to be carried post merge

Peter Szilagy says in his recent tweet. "Rinkeby is too centralized around the Geth team and around me. It's too large to easily investigate, and it would get even more complex merged in with a beacon chain. I don't see transitioning it over to a community effort, nor do I think it's worth dragging that data with us."

Marius Van Der Wijden , a developer at Ethereum shares this tweet with a meme quoting it as A Sad Day .

A sad day #Ethereumhttps://t.co/xPugn8rOyg pic.twitter.com/bhQrPL1f19

— MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) May 16, 2022

History of Rinkeby Testnet

Rinkeby Testnet was launched in April 2017 by Geth Team and it used the Proof of Authority consensus protocol. It was also launched in response to the Ropsten spam attacks using Geth's Clique proof-of-authority engine which differs in its specification. Rinkeby is supported by Geth, Nethermind , Hyperledger Besu and maintained by the Geth developer team.

Being a testnet, it was used by developers for testing prior to deploying any smart contract on Ethereum mainnet.

At present, Goerli is another PoA testnet available for application testing purposes. However, with Rinkeby close to deprecation, usage of Sepolia testnet as the testing replacement environment is highly encouraged by Go Ethereum developers.

For the time being Rinkeby is not fully terminated, and it will continue to work for some time. It is also supported on Etherscan . Rinkeby Ether can be requested from an authorized faucet with a limit of 18 ETH/ 3 days.Rinkeby faucet was developed by the Ethereum Foundation.This testnet only supports Geth, the official Ethereum client written in Golang.

Check out "Ethereum Testnets after The Merge" to follow the testnets that will be available for public use after the upcoming upgrade.