The co-founder and core developer of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has announced vital proposals in his latest post, focusing on enhancing Ethereum Layer 1 (L1) scaling while making it more accessible for users to run local nodes.
In the detailed post on Ethresearch, Buterin outlined the strategy to address growing challenges faced by node operators, especially regarding storage. This is a critical aspect of maintaining Ethereum’s decentralization ethos amidst its rapid expansion.
In the past few years, Ethereum has seen unprecedented growth, driven after trends in decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, and on-chain gaming. However, this success has revealed its limitations, such as high transaction fees and slow confirmation during peak times.
Buterin calls for three major developments via this post, building a distributed storage solution, separate adjustment for execution and storage, and a prioritized rollout of EIP-4444—a major improvement proposal focused on node storage.
Butrin’s post throws a spotlight on “partially stateless nodes,” a new node type designed to verify blocks without storing the entire state. These nodes allow users to maintain only a subset of the state relevant to their needs, such as data for commonly used ERC20 tokens or DeFi applications. This could reduce storage demands significantly by up to 50%.
“This type of node would give the benefits of direct local access to the state that a user needs to care about, as well as maximal full privacy of access to that state,” he said.
The EIP-4444, which will limit nodes to storing just 36 days of historical data, eases the disk space requirements. A distributed history storage solution using erasure coding will ensure long-term data availability without burdening individual nodes or relying on centralized providers.
Buterin emphasized the importance of local nodes for trustless, censorship-resistant, and privacy-friendly access to the blockchain. While cautioning against over-reliance on cryptographic solutions like ZK-EVMs and PIR, he stated that these solutions have high costs, metadata privacy risks, and are vulnerable to censorship.
“A market dominated by a few RPC providers will face pressure to censor users,” he warned, highlighting the need for accessible personal nodes.
Additionally, Buterin suggests adjusting gas pricing to make storage more expensive and execution cheaper, aiming to optimize resource use on the network.
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