Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin Proposes Partially Stateless Nodes for Scalability

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a new approach to scaling the Ethereum network while preserving trustless, censorship-resistant access. On May 19, Buterin shared a post detailing how to make Ethereum’s layer-1 scaling more user-friendly for those running local nodes for personal use. He emphasized the importance of independent users running nodes, noting that a market dominated by a few Remote Procedure Call (RPC) providers poses risks of censorship. RPC providers allow wallets, users, and apps to interact with the blockchain without running their own nodes, but this setup can lead to deplatforming or censorship of users, as many RPC providers already exclude entire countries.

Buterin argued that reasons such as expensive fully-trustless cryptographic solutions and metadata privacy highlight the need for greater ease in running a personal node. His proposed solution involves a novel type of node called “partially stateless nodes.” These nodes 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. Partially stateless nodes address this 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.

The partially stateless nodes would operate by validating blocks statelessly, meaning they do not require the storage of the full Merkle proofs or the entire blockchain history. Instead, they can selectively keep certain parts of the state up to date. Users could configure their nodes to save data related to their accounts, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, and commonly used tokens like stablecoins and Ether (ETH). The rest of the data would be left out, and queries beyond the stored subset would fail or be routed through an RPC solution. This approach aims to balance the need for scalability with the importance of decentralization and user autonomy.