Tanahub.com — Vitalik Buterin Discusses Ethereum’s Future Roadmap in ‘The Purge’ Blog Post
On October 26, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published the fifth blog post in his series on Ethereum’s future roadmap. He detailed “The Purge,” a process aimed at reducing data bloat and simplifying the Ethereum protocol.
In his writing, Buterin explained that The Purge will cut down on data storage and remove outdated features from the network, making Ethereum more efficient.
While this process won’t directly lower Ethereum gas fees, the resulting improvements to network performance could naturally reduce gas fees over time.
One of the key challenges The Purge aims to address is the growing demand for data storage, which has become a barrier for new nodes joining the Ethereum network.
Currently, running a fully synchronized Ethereum node requires over 1.17 terabytes (TB) of storage, primarily for storing historical data. The accumulation of this data drives up storage requirements, potentially limiting participation in the network.
Through The Purge, Ethereum could reduce the storage requirements for new nodes. For instance, nodes might no longer need to permanently store all historical data, thus easing the storage burden and speeding up node synchronization.
This step is expected to make participation in the Ethereum network more efficient and affordable, enabling more nodes to join without meeting large storage requirements.
Buterin also pointed out that every piece of new data added to the network is currently stored permanently, causing the network’s “state” to grow indefinitely. In this context, the state refers to all information or data stored on the blockchain that may be required for future transactions or smart contracts.
Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM) is designed with the assumption that once a state object is created, it will always be available and accessible for transactions. This design makes it challenging to “expire” or delete old state objects.
In simpler terms, this means that every new piece of data increases the size of the system, eventually making the network slower and more expensive to use.
To address this, Buterin proposed the concept of partial state expiry, where rarely accessed state data can “expire” or become temporarily inactive. However, this data could still be retrieved in the future using cryptographic proofs. This would prevent the state size from growing indefinitely while maintaining efficient network operations.
Previously, Buterin introduced The Verge, a step towards stateless verification within the Ethereum network. Announced on October 23, The Verge aims to simplify and secure block verification without requiring extensive data storage.
Stateless verification allows block verification to be computationally lightweight. This innovation makes running a full node on the network highly affordable, enabling devices like mobile wallets, browser wallets, and even smartwatches to operate Ethereum nodes.
Source: Volubit.id