According to The Block, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed the concept of 'partially stateless nodes,' a technology that can save storage space by only retaining a portion of selected data.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a new roadmap this Monday aimed at addressing Ethereum's scalability issues by increasing the Layer-1 gas limit, which includes a new concept called 'partially stateless nodes.'
"Buterin wrote in a recent article: 'Aside from concerns about network security, the most common criticism regarding raising the Layer-1 gas limit is that it makes running full nodes more difficult.'
Buterin added that the significance of running full nodes is that it provides users with a 'trustless, censorship-resistant, and privacy-preserving' way to access the blockchain.
To expand the Layer-1 gas limit without impacting the operation of full nodes, Buterin proposed several short-term priorities, including the implementation of EIP-4444. This proposal limits nodes to storing a maximum of 36 days of historical data, thereby reducing the disk space required by other participants.
Currently, running a full Ethereum node requires storing the entire blockchain state (approximately 1TB of state data and about 500GB of historical data). EIP-4444 will offload the task of storing historical data, thereby easing the burden on nodes.
Buterin's other short-term proposals also include: building a distributed historical data storage solution and adjusting the gas pricing mechanism—making 'storage' more expensive while 'execution' becomes cheaper.
In the mid-term plan, Buterin introduced the concept of 'stateless verification,' a method that allows nodes to interact with the blockchain without storing Merkle branches (used for verifying data integrity). He stated that this would reduce the storage requirements for nodes by about 50%, significantly easing the burden on them.
In his latest proposal, Buterin further introduced the new concept of 'partially stateless nodes.' He indicated that these nodes are expected to increase the Layer-1 gas limit by 10 to 100 times.
According to Buterin, these types of nodes verify blocks and the entire chain through stateless validation or zkEVM without needing to store all the data. They are designed to only retain a portion of a selected dataset while still being able to handle requests related to that subset of data.
