Ethereum Network

The Ethereum network is a peer-to-peer network where nodes participate in order to maintain the blockchain and contribute to the consensus mechanism.

Networks can be divided into three types, based on requirements and usage.

Mainnet

Mainnet is the current live network of Ethereum. The current version of mainnet is Byzantium (Metropolis) and its chain ID is 1.

Chain ID is used to identify the network. A block explorer which shows detailed information about blocks and other relevant metrics is available at ​etherscan.​io.

This can be used to explore the Ethereum blockchain.

Testnet

Testnet is also called Ropsten and is the widely used test network for the Ethereum blockchain.

This test blockchain is used to test smart contracts and DApps before being deployed to the production live blockchain.

Moreover, being a test network, it allows experimentation and research.

The main testnet is called Ropsten which contains all features of other smaller and special purpose testnets that were created for specific releases.

Privatenet

As the name suggests, this is the private network that can be created by generating a new genesis block.

This is usually the case in private blockchain distributed ledger networks, where a private group of entities start their blockchain and use it as a permissioned blockchain.

The following table shows the list of Ethereum networks with their network IDs.

These network IDs are used to identify the network by Ethereum clients.

Suryateja Pericherla

Suryateja Pericherla, at present is a Research Scholar (full-time Ph.D.) in the Dept. of Computer Science & Systems Engineering at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. Previously worked as an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSE at Vishnu Institute of Technology, India.

He has 11+ years of teaching experience and is an individual researcher whose research interests are Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Computer Security, Network Security and Blockchain.

He is a member of professional societies like IEEE, ACM, CSI and ISCA. He published several research papers which are indexed by SCIE, WoS, Scopus, Springer and others.