Moving to Calibrationnet as developer-focused testnet

[maciejwitowski]

Hyperspace testnet will be decommissioned at the end of May 2023. Calibrationnet will serve as the main developer testnet.

Rationale

The Hyperspace testnet was created a few months ago as the main developer testnet before production. It was crucial to provide a smooth experience for developers who were building their first applications on the Filecoin network and participating in multiple hackathons, including Spacewarp.

At the time, a separate developer-oriented testnet was needed because the Filecoin Virtual Machine was still in beta stage. It was not possible to use an existing, perpetual testnet like Calibrationnet, which had higher stability expectations.

However, operating two networks, each one having a rich ecosystem requires a lot of time and resources. These efforts could instead be directed towards one pre-production network. Also, having a developer focused testnet left developer community disconnected from the rest of the network participants, like storage providers, and real network expectations.
With FVM M2.1 (FEVM) reaching production-level, Hyperspace testnet can be unified with Calibrationnet.

Timeline

Hyperspace will run until the end of May 2023.
Calibrationnet is already up and running. We are working on tooling, ecosystem and docs to ensure a smooth developer transition.