Kovan is a resilient and secure testnet that has served as the primary testing and proving grounds for Optimism as their testnet of choice. In operation since March 2017, the Kovan POA-based testnet is dedicated to providing reliability and Ethereum-patchset compatibility for applications including London. Supporting the chain infrastructure and upgrades can be costly and time-consuming. After it was abandoned by Parity in 2019 due to their Polkadot plans https://www.parity.io/blog/announcing-the-end-of-parity-support-for-kovan/ we decided to keep it alive, swapped consensus from pure AuRa to POA, added support of the second client Nethermind, forked to Berlin and London, removed unused PWASM dependency Kovan continues to play a vital role as a testbed for Optimism development as well as associated Ethereum tools and infrastructure, and funding will help support a healthy and robust testing environment. BlockScout is also open to working more closely with the Optimism team in an ongoing capacity to ensure feature and infra availability on Kovan.