Vitalik Buterin proposes partially stateless nodes for Ethereum scaling

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled a proposal to preserve trustless, censorship-resistant access to Ethereum, even as the network scales. 

On May 19, Buterin shared a post outlining how to make Ethereum’s layer-1 scaling “more friendly” to users running local nodes for personal use. The Ethereum co-founder highlighted the importance of independent users running nodes, saying that a market dominated by a few Remote Procedure Call (RPC) providers risks censorship. 

RPC providers let wallets, users and apps interact with the blockchain without running their own nodes. Crypto wallets are usually connected to an RPC provider behind the scenes. Buterin said there are risks to this setup. 

“A market structure dominated by a few RPC providers is one that will face strong pressure to deplatform or censor users. Many RPC providers already exclude entire countries,” Buterin wrote. 

In addition to censorship, Buterin argued that reasons like expensive fully-trustless cryptographic solutions and metadata privacy show that there’s value in ensuring greater ease for those running a personal node. 

In the proposal, Buterin’s solution relies on a novel type of node called “partially stateless nodes.” They are designed to help users maintain privacy-preserving access to blockchain data without the heavy resource demands of running a full node. 

As Ethereum scales and the gas limit increases, running a full node requires more storage and bandwidth. Buterin said partially stateless nodes address the issue by allowing users to verify the blockchain and serve local data, but only store a subset of the Ethereum state, based on the user’s needs.

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The nodes would operate by validating blocks statelessly. This means they don’t require the storage of the full Merkle proofs or the entire blockchain history. They can selectively keep certain parts of the state up to date. 

This means that users could configure their nodes only to save data related to their accounts, the decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and their commonly used tokens like stablecoins and Ether (ETH). 

The rest of the data will be left out, and queries beyond the stored subset will fail or be routed through an RPC solution. 

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