What’s the difference between Mainnet and Testnet ?

If you are a programmer or know anything about programming outside a blockchain then obviously you have heard of production and test environment or sandbox.

So when you are making a new piece of software or some new code before you put it in a production environment you want to test it so you put it in a clone of your production environment.

example…

You are working on a Fintech piece of software and you need to test it because it’s going to be moving money and you don’t want to move real money when you are testing because what if it doesn’t work, it’s broken or it causes a bunch of losses then you lose money.

so you put it in a test environment…

Where you have one server that actually does transaction and another server that mimics this server but transactions are in demo mode they don’t actually move money right? so that will be your test environment.

On blockchain you have a Testnet which is where you test move coins and tokens between leading accounts. You can test for throughput, how much transaction volume etc. But at the end of the day none of the transaction is real and no real financial information, data or money is changing hands.

On the Mainnet this is your production environment, when you put something on the mainnet you are actually doing real transaction that are now irreversible and if you are talking about tokens coins or anything with some type of monetary value you are now moving money so that is Mainnet.