PANews reported on March 7 that the Ethereum Foundation published an article in its official blog that the Mekong development network was originally intended to provide a place for wallet developers to experiment with changes in user experience (UX), while also giving stakers confidence in future changes to Pectra. The Pectra network upgrade has been activated on Ethereum's Sepolia and Holesky test networks. These networks can now be used to test the functionality of the Pectra upgrade. In view of this, the Mekong test network will be discontinued on March 7, 2025.

Application and tool developers are encouraged to use Sepolia to test applications, smart contracts, and other EVM functions. Its set of permissioned validators provides a stable testing environment. In addition, many local development environments also allow testing against a copy of the Ethereum mainnet state.

For stakers and infrastructure providers interested in protocol-level testing, it is recommended to wait for the finalization of the Holesky testnet or follow announcements on the Ethereum Development Discord for information on alternative testing venues. For validator setup testing, stakers should also consider using the Ephemery testnet. This network resets weekly and supports lightweight end-to-end testing of the validator lifecycle.