# Testnet Q3 2026: the Polkadot Testnet on a new relay chain at half the footprint

**URL:** <https://forum.polkadot.network/t/testnet-q3-2026-the-polkadot-testnet-on-a-new-relay-chain-at-half-the-footprint/19188>\
**Category:** Ecosystem\
**Created:** [October 30, 2026, 4:18pm UTC](https://forum.polkadot.network/t/testnet-q3-2026-the-polkadot-testnet-on-a-new-relay-chain-at-half-the-footprint/19188 "2026-10-30T16:18:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![PolkadotTestnet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PolkadotTestnet](https://forum.polkadot.network/u/PolkadotTestnet)\
**Post date:** [October 30, 2026, 4:18pm UTC](https://forum.polkadot.network/t/testnet-q3-2026-the-polkadot-testnet-on-a-new-relay-chain-at-half-the-footprint/19188/1 "2026-10-30T16:18:25Z")

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Paseo is the project that maintains the **Polkadot Testnet**. As of today the testnet hosts:

- the **Polkadot Products Devnet** ;
- **Parity’s staging environment** ;
- **community parachains**.

In Q3 Paseo restarted the Testnet’s relay chain from block 0 on a smaller footprint, as planned in the Q3/Q4 2026 funding proposal (referendum #1919). Asset Hub and People kept their state, Bulletin joined as a system chain.

This post summarises the quarter:

- what runs on the Testnet today, and who runs it;
- how the Testnet did against the SLOs agreed in the proposal;
- how validators performed;
- how runtimes are now released;
- what the Polkadot Testnet dashboard monitors;
- how the quarter was paid for.

## At a glance

| | 1 July (legacy relay) | 30 September (new relay) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Validators in the active set | 152 | 58 |
| Cores | 56 | 19, all assigned |
| System chains | 5 | 3: Asset Hub, People, Bulletin |
| Infrastructure providers paid by the bounty | 27 | 22 |
| Nodes run by providers | 172 | 76 (58 validators, 6 collators, 12 RPC nodes) |
| Quarterly operating budget | 196,250 USDC | 100,400 USDC (−48.8%) |

## The reset

The legacy relay was shrunk in steps while the new one was brought up, and teams moved across at a single announced cutover on 6 July. Collectives, Coretime and Bridge Hub were retired. Cores are now assigned directly on the relay with `coretime.assign_core`, so an allocation stays in place until it is changed, with no sale cycle to renew.

## What runs on the Polkadot Testnet

Every core on the relay is currently in use, shared between:

- **the Testnet’s system chains:** Asset Hub, People and Bulletin;
- **Parity’s staging environment:** the Next chains, ahead-of-release builds of Asset Hub, People and Bulletin;
- **community parachains:** 6 different chains as of today.

**The Polkadot Products Devnet** runs on the Testnet’s system chains.

This devnet is where any developer can find a sandbox to develop products with the new tech stack arriving at Polkadot. As of Asset Hub block `#15,062,015` (29 October, 13:04 UTC), the community project [Devnet Apps](https://devnet-apps.dev-dot.li/) counts:

| .dot names registered | Apps deployed | Publishers |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 476 | 388 | 141 |

We were also able to account for 988 user registrations on the devnet at the time of writing.

## SLO results

The proposal sets service-level objectives for the relay chain, the system chains (Asset Hub 1000, People 1004, Bulletin 1010), validators, runtime upgrades, incident response and observability. Results for Q3:

| SLO | Target | Q3 result |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Relay chain availability | 99.5% monthly | **Met every month.** Since the cutover on 6 July the relay never went a minute without a block; its longest gap was 24 seconds. |
| System chain availability | 99.5% monthly | Every system chain above 99.5% over the quarter, counting stalls of 5 minutes or more: Asset Hub 99.59%, People 99.75%, Bulletin 99.99%. |
| Validator participation | ≥95% of the active set online | ≥95% in every era from 7 September to the end of the quarter. |
| Runtime upgrades (fallback) | Fellowship release deployed within 7 business days (95%) / 10 (99%); no Friday upgrades | Runtimes now ship on Paseo’s own schedule, ahead of Fellowship releases (see Runtimes). No upgrade was enacted on a Friday. |
| Incident response | P0 acknowledged ≤30 min, mitigation plan ≤60 min | Since 11 September a chain stall pages the core team on Telegram at the next 5-minute liveness check. |
| Observability coverage | 100% of relay and system chains | **Met.** Liveness and RPC reachability checks for the relay and all three system chains, and per-validator authoring and backing observability, all on the Polkadot Testnet dashboard. |

## Validator performance

Validator performance improved compared to previous quarters. Over Q3, A+ was the most common grade in every era we read, and A or A+ accounted for almost all grades:

- **77.4%** of the 15,292 validator grades issued from 23 July to 30 September were **A+** , and **93.8%** were **A or A+**.
- In **20 eras every validator** in the active set was graded A or A+.
- On **29 September** (era 3624), 49 of 56 validators were graded A+ and the other 7 were graded A.
- From **7 September** (era 3534) to the end of the quarter, at least 95% of the active set participated in every era, and **94.7%** of grades were A or A+.

Across Q3, validators cast **97.5%** of the 41.8 million backing votes they were assigned, and confirmed parachain data availability in **98.3%** of bitfields.

The participation SLI counts a validator as participating when it misses at most 20% of its backing votes in an era.

Grades are collected from ONE-T by Turboflakes (`paseo-onet-api.turboflakes.io`), which scores each validator per era from its missed-vote ratio and bitfield availability. The dashboard’s participation page, [polkadot-testnet.r0gue.io/participation](https://polkadot-testnet.r0gue.io/participation), tracks the SLI hourly and alerts the team when it drops below 95%.

## Runtimes: how Paseo releases now

Until Q2, Paseo’s runtime work was to follow each Polkadot Fellowship release. From Q3, the Testnet’s runtimes are developed, versioned and released from [paseo-network/runtimes](https://github.com/paseo-network/runtimes) on Paseo’s own schedule to accommodate for a faster pace, so new features reach the Testnet without waiting for a Fellowship release. The 7-business-day SLO stays in place as a fallback.

**The release process:**

1. **A regular cadence.** Paseo keeps a regular cadence unless a blocker stops it. Each week the Asset Hub and People runtimes are synced with the latest features and versions of [Individuality](https://github.com/paritytech/individuality-community), and the Bulletin runtime with [polkadot-bulletin-chain](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-bulletin-chain). Recent examples: [#452](https://github.com/paseo-network/runtimes/pull/452) and [#453](https://github.com/paseo-network/runtimes/pull/453).
2. **Fellowship as the production reference.** From the [Fellowship runtimes](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/runtimes) Paseo takes features that differ from Individuality and, above all, runtime configuration, so the Testnet mirrors Polkadot production as closely as possible.
3. **On-demand releases.** Outside the cadence, a runtime is released on demand when it needs an urgent change, or when its configuration gets in the way of the community building its products.

**How an upgrade is enacted:**

1. **Build.** Every runtime is built with srtool, so anyone can reproduce the wasm and check it against the published digest.
2. **Static gates.** The wasm hash must match the srtool digest, the spec version must move forward, and no other upgrade may be pending. Host functions and runtime-API versions are diffed against the live chain, and the claim-queue offset that stock collators will derive is computed and checked.
3. **Rehearsal.** The upgrade is rehearsed on a fork of the live Testnet (relay, Asset Hub, People and Bulletin), using the same collator binary providers run in production.
4. **Enactment.** The upgrade is enacted, then backing, inclusion and finality are watched until the chain produces normally on the new code.

Weights have been regenerated on a dedicated benchmark machine since 10 September.

**Releases and upgrades in Q3:**

- 12 releases (v2.3.1 to v2.5.3) and 42 merged pull requests.
- 14 runtime upgrades enacted: 6 on Asset Hub, 7 on People and 1 on Bulletin.
- The system chains moved to polkadot-sdk stable2606 and Fellowship v2.4.0.
- Q3 releases carried functionality the Fellowship runtimes did not have at the time, now present in Polkadot:
  - the Individuality (Proof of Personhood) subsystem on Asset Hub and People;
  - Bulletin as a system chain;
  - the dotNS gateway;
  - paying contract fees in PGAS.

## Monitoring:

The proposal commits to reachability checks and validator observability for every critical component. During Q3 the [Polkadot Testnet dashboard](https://polkadot-testnet.r0gue.io) became the network’s monitoring and operations console. It now runs these jobs:

| What | How often | Alerts | Since |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Chain liveness** for the relay, Asset Hub, People and Bulletin: asks every RPC endpoint for the latest finalized block and flags a chain that stops advancing | every 5 min | Pages the core team on Telegram and posts to Matrix | 13 Jul (Telegram 11 Sep) |
| **RPC health** of every public endpoint: up/down and whether it serves archive data | every 5 min | Matrix alert that mentions the endpoint’s operator after 15 minutes down | 16 Jul (alerts 27 Jul) |
| **Validator participation SLI** against the 95% target, with each validator’s ONE-T grade | hourly | Matrix alert below 95%, critical below 90% | 27 Jul |
| **Backing health** per validator group and per validator | hourly | Shown on the dashboard | 4 Aug |
| **Backing report** naming validators that miss more than 20% of their votes, with their operators | Mon and Thu | Matrix, operators mentioned | 14 Sep |
| **Relay view of the system chains** : parachain heads and backed candidates for Asset Hub, People and Bulletin | every 2 min | Shown on the dashboard | 4 Aug |
| **Client versions** of every validator, and from October every system-chain collator, against the latest polkadot-sdk release | every 6 h | Weekly Tuesday reminder to operators running old versions | 6 Aug (reminder 25 Sep) |
| **Validator whitelist** on Asset Hub staking: validators not on the list are removed from the validator candidates | every 4 h | Matrix | 22 Jul |
| **Bulletin storage** used against a 200 GiB threshold | every 15 min | Matrix | 17 Jul |

Two additions came in October:

- the checks now also run over IPv6, so a provider with a broken IPv4 route is not reported as down;
- a check that the number of validators registered on Asset Hub matches the configured validator count.

## Funding and payouts

Paseo is funded by a Polkadot treasury bounty held in USDC on Polkadot Asset Hub. Referendum 1919 funded H2 2026 with **210,800 USDC** , 46% less than H1. On 29 September the curators closed the H1 bounty (#0), returning its unspent 328 USDC to the treasury, and activated bounty #1.

The Q3 payouts went out on 1 October as **30 child bounties** of bounty #1, all in Polkadot Asset Hub block 21,285,403:

- **98,810 USDC** paid for Q3, 98.4% of the quarterly budget.
- **111,990 USDC** left for Q4 and contingency.

## Carried into Q4

- **Relay runtime upgrade** to v2.5.0-relay, released in Q3 and not yet enacted.