Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, recently highlighted the increasing urgency of tackling blockchain ‘state bloat’—the ever-growing size of the network’s active data, including contract storage and account balances. Buterin warned that without intervention, the escalating hardware demands required to run a full Ethereum node could threaten the network’s decentralization by pricing out individual operators and centralizing node management among large institutional entities.
To combat this systemic growth, Buterin proposed implementing a system analogous to ‘garbage collection’ (GC), a feature common in traditional programming languages where unreferenced data is automatically purged or recycled. In the context of Ethereum, this GC function would manifest as a highly sophisticated mechanism known as ‘state expiration’ or ‘state rent’.
State expiration aims to prune older, rarely accessed state data from the primary active database used by validators and standard nodes. Data that has remained untouched for extended periods (potentially several years) would not be deleted entirely, but rather shunted off into a specialized archival layer. While this data would remain accessible via historical nodes or specific proofs, it would cease burdening the daily operations of the main network.
Buterin views state expiration as a crucial, long-term priority on the Ethereum roadmap. Its implementation is designed to dramatically reduce the initialization time for new nodes and lower the overall storage requirements, thereby helping the network retain its core decentralized nature and accessibility.
Source: Vitalik calls for a ‘garbage collection’ function to stop Ethereum bloat
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