Following a successful and complete migration to our Pre-Mainnet network (Testnet3), today we will be switching off Testnet2 forever.
Mysterium’s Testnet2 first launched in December 2020. Over the months, it became home to thousands of new nodes and users.
To honour its life, here’s a short retrospective on the many milestones this network achieved…
When Testnet2 was born, a number of new functionalities were introduced.
The VPN apps received a makeover with a slick new interface and a bunch of new features, including an integration with Coingate so users could top up their accounts using all kinds of crypto.
The Linux VPN app also joined the Mysterium family.
Mysterium VPN also became fully functional in China, breaking down that Not-So-Great Firewall.
Eventually, Mysterium was welcoming 70,000 Monthly Active Users! That was double the amount since it first launched. (We’ve now reached 107,000 on Testnet3 : )
To spread the network even more globally and serve the needs of our fast growing community, the node rewards program expanded and we added a number of new countries to the bounty list.
The Testnet2 node network consequently grew from 600 in December 2020 to 1800 by July 2021! That’s 3 x growth in just 6 months.
Network traffic snowballed, growing more than 3 times, to 400 Tb monthly.
Testnet2 was also a sandbox for Hermes protocol, the P2P micropayments solution that was uniquely developed just for network.
Since we moved to Pre-Mainnet, the growth has not slowed down. Just take a look at that growth in 3 months!
(We have since linked up with Polygon chain as a Layer 2 solution, so that both users and node runners can enjoy instant and dirt cheap payments… so brace yourselves.)
RIP Testnet2, you were a brave network that battled through bugs, BETA and internet blackouts.
May you rest in peace, somewhere in the ether, joining the graveyard of accidentally erased hard-drives, corrupted files and permanently emptied trash folders.