Vitalik Buterin Pushes Stateless Nodes as Key to Ethereum L1 Scaling
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, has released a new proposal pushing the use of stateless nodes to scale the Ethereum Layer 1 (L1) network without sacrificing decentralization or user privacy.
The new approach is to ease the burden of full node operation and promote trustless access to data and improved censorship resistance.
Vitalik’s proposal is focused on solving the problems of the limitations full especially as the L1 gas limit increases.
While ZK-EVMs offer scalable verification, Buterin argues that local nodes remain essential for private, uncensored blockchain interaction.
Stateless nodes could ease resource demands on Ethereum by validating blocks without keeping full Merkle branches.
Instead, they would hold only parts of the blockchain data relevant to each user.
This setup strikes a middle ground and offers more security than light clients but uses fewer resources than full nodes.
To move toward a stateless future, Vitalik Buterin recommends rolling out EIP-4444.
This proposal limits how long nodes store old blockchain data, down to about 36 days, thus cutting down on disk space.
Alongside this, he supports a shared archival network that uses erasure coding to make sure past data remains accessible.
He also proposes changes to Ethereum’s gas fees. Raising the cost of creating new states and lowering execution costs would shift developer incentives and help reduce unnecessary blockchain growth.
Stateless nodes could be tailored to each user. People could choose which parts of Ethereum’s data to keep, like specific ERC20 tokens, DeFi apps, or recently used wallets.
These nodes could also answer local RPC requests, boosting privacy and cutting down reliance on centralized services.