Mainnet

Mainnet is the live production network of a blockchain, where transactions move real value and the ledger is the one everyone treats as authoritative. It is distinguished from test networks, which run the same software with valueless coins. A mainnet launch means the genesis block has been produced, validators or miners are securing real balances, and mistakes are no longer cheap: a bad contract deployment costs real fees and can lock real funds. Wallets and nodes select a network by chain identifier, so sending assets while connected to the wrong one is a common and often unrecoverable error. Projects that issue a token on another chain first sometimes run a later migration to their own mainnet.