Rococo to be deprecated in October

Ecosystem
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The Death of Rococo :skull_and_crossbones:

NOTE: As of the 14th October 2024, at block 12625076 Rococo was depreciated. If you’d like to onboard onto Westend or Paseo, please jump to the end of this forum post.

aka Developer testnets and where to find them

Nothing lasts forever, and with the launch of Paseo, it’s time now to say goodbye to Rococo. :wave:

Rococo will be deprecated in phases and the plan is to reduce the amount of validators over the next several months, concluding in closing Rococo to the public after Agile Coretime is launched on Polkadot. Developers then have two testnets to choose from, Westend and Paseo, depending on what they want to test.

During the decommissioning of Rococo, the Parity DevOps team, who have dutifully operated the network for its 3.5 year lifespan, will reduce the number of validators according to the following schedule. The deadline to migrate off Rococo is October of 2024. At the end of June, we will decrease the number of validators to support the number of parachains we have running on the testnet, meaning there should be no outage / downtime for teams leveraging Rococo in June.

At the end of July we will further decrease the number of validators which will begin to impact some parachains if they’ve not yet migrated. Currently we have around 16 chains producing blocks consistently on Rococo, so this gives the current teams approx 1.5 months to migrate to their new testnet of choice.

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Moving onto the choice of testnets and how to decide where to test what:

  • Westend is to be used for Polkadot protocol/feature preview testing.
  • Paseo is for testing changes to your chain and for dapps / teams with your chain.

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The above will be the typical flow of upgrades to the network. Here you can see Westend will receive all changes first before they are proposed for Kusama. Westend is the best place for teams wanting to test the new developments on Polkadot (think: coretime, async backing, elastic scaling).

Paseo will mirror Polkadot closely in terms of runtime releases, upgrading shortly after the governance proposal is raised to ship the changes to Polkadot. This makes Paseo stable and predictable for 3rd parity integrations or for teams building on top of your chain.

Are you interested in onboarding to Westend? Join the element room
:point_right: https://matrix.to/#/#westend-support:parity.io

Are you interested in onboarding to Paseo?
:point_right: Head to the github and create an issue for the team to onboard your chain.

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FYI we have now scaled down 40 validators on Rococo. The next reduction will be at the end of the month :slight_smile: I’ve contacted all teams still running a Rococo chain that haven’t migrated so we should be on track!

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Is Rococo still to be deprecated in October? Do we have the exact date for this?

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After a few internal exchanges, we’ve decided to set the deprecation date for Rococo to be Monday 2024-10-13T22:00:00Z.

If you know of any teams currently using Rococo please tell them to prefer Westend or Paseo, the community run test network. For cases where it’s complicated, please send them our way (Birdo or myself) and we’ll take are.

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Goodnight sweet prince

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Assuming this means we’ll expect coretime on Paseo #soon?!

Looking forward to writing guides for Paseo / porting Rococo stuff (EduChain) over to it

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You are correct @bader , the expectation is that Paseo follows Polkadot 1:1. However I let @Birdo give more details on this if needed.

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ja that’s right.
The team are working on the upgrade currently :slight_smile:
@hectorb / @alejandro / @educlerici will have further information and can share approx timelines.

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Bumping this thread one last time, a last reminder that we will be bidding our dear Rococo testnet farewell on 2024-10-13T22:00:00Z, which is on Monday.

The activity seems to have slowed down significantly on the Rococo testnet relay, so our communication efforts have paid off:

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The team is already working on replacing all mentions of Rococo in documentation and other resources: Adaptations following Rococo shutdown · Issue #83 · polkadot-developers/polkadot-docs · GitHub , we could certainly use your help here to s/rococo/paseo/Ig.

We recommend using Paseo, the community run test network, instead. Don’t hesitate to reach out in case of any issues or questions.

Have a lovely rest of the week :v:

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Rococo has just produced its final block—#12625076. But before we say goodbye, we’ve hidden a little secret in there for you to find. Think of it as a farewell scavenger hunt! :disguised_face:

Thank you all for bearing with us during the sunset of this beautiful test network.

I think it’s a good time to close this thread.

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Farewell, Dear Rococo :man_detective:

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