Source: Cointelegraph
Original: (Vitalik Buterin proposes a new scaling solution for Ethereum (ETH): Introducing partial state nodes)
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently announced a proposal aimed at protecting Ethereum's trustless and censorship-resistant access capabilities, even as the network continues to scale.
On May 19, Buterin published an article detailing how to make Ethereum's layer scaling more 'user-friendly' for individuals running local nodes. The Ethereum co-founder emphasized the importance of independent users running nodes, noting the serious censorship risk posed by a market dominated by a few remote procedure call (RPC) providers.
RPC providers allow wallets, users, and applications to interact with the blockchain without running their own nodes. In fact, cryptocurrency wallets often silently connect to RPC providers in the background. Buterin believes this architectural design poses potential risks.
"The market structure dominated by a few RPC providers will face strong pressure to ban or censor users. Currently, several RPC providers have completely excluded user access from certain countries," Buterin stated in the article.
In addition to the review issues, Buterin further stated that the high costs of fully trustless crypto solutions and factors like metadata privacy protection indicate the significant value of providing a more convenient operating environment for individual node operators.
In this proposal, Buterin's solution relies on an innovative node design called 'partial state nodes.' These nodes are specifically designed to help users maintain privacy-protected access to blockchain data while significantly reducing the resource consumption required to operate a traditional full node.
As the Ethereum network expands and gas limits increase, running a full node requires more and more storage space and network bandwidth. Buterin stated that partial state nodes address this issue effectively by allowing users to verify the blockchain and provide local data services while only storing a subset of Ethereum state data based on personal needs.
These nodes will verify the blockchain in a stateless manner. This means they do not need to store the complete Merkle proof or the entire blockchain history, but can selectively maintain updates to specific state data.
Specifically, users can configure their nodes to only save data related to their own accounts, commonly used decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, and tokens used in daily transactions (such as stablecoins and Ethereum).
The remaining data is intentionally omitted, and when queries exceed the stored subset, requests will fail or be redirected to be handled through RPC solutions.
Related news: Coinbase is facing a lawsuit for allegedly violating Illinois' biometric privacy law.
