$PROVE The Future is Stateless: The Role of ZK Storage Proofs in Scaling L1s
An ELI5 Guide to a Core Ethereum Upgrade $PROVE
The biggest challenge for blockchains like Ethereum is that they are getting too big. To participate in the network, a node has to store the entire history of every transaction and account. This is already over 2 terabytes of data and growing fast. This makes it very expensive to run a node, which leads to centralization.
The long-term solution is called "Statelessness," and ZK technology is the key to unlocking it.
Let's explain it like this:
Imagine the Ethereum blockchain is a giant library with millions of books. Right now, to be a librarian (a node), you have to own a personal copy of every single book in the entire library. It's incredibly expensive and takes up a huge amount of space.
"Statelessness" is a future upgrade where the librarian doesn't need to own any of the books. When someone comes and asks for a specific book, the librarian can just request a "storage proof" from the network. This proof is a tiny, magical piece of paper that mathematically guarantees that the book exists and what's written inside it, without the librarian ever having to have seen the book before.
$PROVE The infrastructure from @Succinct is essential for generating these ZK "storage proofs" quickly and cheaply. This technology will dramatically lower the hardware requirements to run a node, making the network more decentralized, and is a critical component for scaling Ethereum to support a billion users.
