The Future of Ethereum is an ongoing project. Vitalik Buterin is publishing articles on each of the six steps. We already covered four steps of this roadmap. The fifth step is The Purge.
This upgrade should reduce the computational costs of running an Ethereum node. Furthermore, it should make Ethereum simpler. So, let’s take a closer look at what The Purge is all about.
Table of Contents
What Is The Purge?
With The Purge, Buterin and his team, want to make Ethereum simpler. The current complexity has two main factors,
- Historical data needs to be stored. Each transaction makes this storage bigger. All clients need to download the full chain and constantly update and store it. This increases load and sync time.
- Protocol features. It’s easier to add new features to the protocol, compared to removing them. Hence, there’s an increase in the complexity of the code.
This leads to the need to find solutions for these issues. Ethereum needs to reduce its complexity and the way it grows. However, at the same time, it needs to make sure that all dApps, smart contracts, or NFTs, keep working. Hence, The Purge wants to find a balance in this. Below is a picture of The Purge and its roadmap.
Source: Vitalik Buterin’s article on The Purge
Its goals are:
- Reducing client storage requirements.
- Reducing protocol complexity.
For more technical information on The Purge, I can recommend Buterin’s article.
History Expiry
Fully synced nodes keep growing bigger, by adding historical and new data. However, history storage benefits from the latest block pointing to the previous block. This happens with a hash link. So, instead of all nodes storing all history, nodes should only store a small percentage.
The idea is to have an 18-day storage period for all history. After that, nodes can store data in a distributed way. So, Ethereum needs a distributed solution for history storage. See the picture below.
State Expiry
In case history storage gets removed, the nodes still keep growing by 50 GB per year. That’s because the state of the chain keeps growing. It’s not so easy to expire state. Simply because a blockchain expects all transactions to be there forever. Statelessness could be an option here. Only a limited number of nodes would be needed to record the chain’s state. All other nodes can run statelessly.
There are many obstacles and requirements to navigate here. Buterin’s article goes much more in-depth into these.
“State expiry” has been shrunk, to reflect a general consensus that it’s a fairly low-priority and low-urgency item esp given stateless clients and PBS / execution tickets. pic.twitter.com/Z0ziIsDnGt
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 30, 2023
Feature Cleanup
The simpler a protocol is, the easier it is to use for both users and devs. As a result, Buterin would like to make Ethereum simpler. He wants to reduce or remove complexity. He says that there’s no single fix for this, but rather many small fixes. For example, it should be possible to remove hardly used apps. However, this could be a multi-year-long process.
He also talks about more radical options. This would involve moving protocol features into contract codes.
Conclusion
The Future of Ethereum is an ongoing project. It follows a six-step roadmap. We already covered all other parts of this roadmap. The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, and The Splurge. Today we covered step five, The Purge.
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