Farewell Taurus, Welcome Chronos
Today we mark an important milestone in the Autonomys journey: the retirement of the Taurus test network and the launch of its successor, Chronos.
Looking Back: The Legacy of Taurus
Over the past year, Taurus has been home to some of our biggest technical and community achievements. It carried the weight of new features, test phases, and experiments that prepared us for the road to mainnet.
- Game of Domains: Taurus hosted multiple phases of our incentivized test program, from Winter is Coming and Crossing the Narrow Sea to The Watcher’s Oath. These challenges stress-tested domains, XDM, staking, and more - surfacing critical bugs, validating fixes, and giving the community a hands-on role in shaping protocol development.
- Operator Growth: More than 600 operators registered during Stage 0, helping us refine UX and improve reliability at scale.
- Cross-Domain Messaging (XDM): Community testing uncovered bottlenecks, bugs and inefficiencies, enabling the engineering team to patch and strengthen this core feature.
Taurus was a proving ground, but as with all testnets, its time has come. With technical debt accumulating and misalignments emerging, we now move to a cleaner, more production-aligned foundation.
Why Chronos?
The name Chronos was chosen by the community through our recent Testnet Naming Contest. Symbolizing time, Chronos represents progress, evolution, and the forward momentum of Autonomys as we step into the AI 3.0 era of infrastructure.
It marks a turning point - toward autonomy, cognition, emergence, and evolution at the protocol layer.
Technical Details
You can connect to Chronos using the following endpoints and explorers:
- RPC (HTTPS):
https://rpc.chronos.autonomys.xyz/ws - RPC (WSS):
wss://rpc.chronos.autonomys.xyz/ws - Substrate Portal: Open Explorer
- Subscan Explorer: https://autonomys-chronos.subscan.io/
- Telemetry: Subspace Telemetry - Chronos
We’d like to extend a special thanks to Subscan for their rapid support in bringing Chronos online, ensuring continuity for our explorers.
If you want to run a node on Chronos, the first build can be found here. We’ll be updating documentation to switch from Taurus to Chronos. In the meantime you can follow existing testnet node running instructions switching --chain taurus to --chain chronos.
Chronos Auto EVM
The Chronos Auto EVM domain has also been instantiated. We’re working with ecosystem partners to deploy tooling onto the EVM stack in the coming days and weeks.
- RPC (HTTPS):
https://auto-evm.chronos.autonomys.xyz/ws - RPC (WSS):
wss://auto-evm.chronos.autonomys.xyz/ws - Substrate Portal: Open Explorer
- Blockscout Explorer: https://explorer.auto-evm.chronos.autonomys.xyz
- Telemetry: Subspace Telemetry - Chronos Auto EVM
- Chain ID: 8700
Transition Notes
For community members, here’s what you can expect as we transition:
- Taurus infrastructure is being wound down now.
- A single RPC endpoint will remain online for a while for historical reference.
- Database backups exist for XDM data, ensuring no loss of testing contributions.
- Astral will also be retired, with Subscan now serving as the recommended explorer going forward.
Other Updates
In the broader context, we are also working on:
- The new staking interface is in alpha and being tested: https://staking.autonomys.xyz/
- An upcoming XDM interface
- A public file explorer for Auto Drive: https://explorer.ai3.storage
What’s Next on Chronos
Chronos will host the next stages of Game of Domains, continuing the trials and incentivized contests that began on Taurus. This includes the resumption of The Watcher’s Oath, giving the community renewed opportunities to earn rewards while safeguarding the protocol.
By moving these programs to Chronos, we ensure participants are testing against a stable, production-equivalent environment that reflects the network Autonomys is becoming.
Closing
Taurus brought us through critical development milestones, but it is Chronos that will carry us into the future. We thank the community for your contributions, patience, and passion - and invite you to join us on Chronos as we continue the journey there.
