Ethereum Foundation Proposes Three Solutions to Address State Bloat Challenge

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: Ethereum Foundation Proposed Three Solutions for One of ETH’s Biggest Problems Original Link: https://cryptonews.net/news/ethereum/32160507/ The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has raised concerns about the network’s growing data load problem, commonly referred to as “state bloat.” The Stateless Consensus team within the foundation warns that accounts, smart contract data, and application code are consuming increasingly more storage space, making it more difficult for nodes to operate.

Ethereum’s “state” encompasses all information regarding the network’s current condition, including account balances, contract storage, and the code powering applications. As a global infrastructure handling billions of dollars in value and running thousands of applications, Ethereum faces a critical challenge: State is constantly growing and never shrinking.

The Core Problem

As state grows, running full nodes becomes both more expensive and more fragile. If state becomes too large or can only be managed by a limited number of powerful operators, Ethereum’s decentralized nature could be compromised. Recent scaling measures, including proto-danksharding and increased gas limits, have boosted network processing capacity but have also accelerated state growth.

Long-Term Solutions

The Stateless Consensus team proposed three different approaches to reduce state overhead and make nodes more sustainable:

State Expiration: Remove long-unused data from the active state and restore it with evidence if needed. Approximately 80% of the current state has not been used for more than a year.

State Archiving: Separate frequently used “active” data from rarely accessed “archive” data. This prevents node performance from declining as the chain ages and ensures the system remains more stable over time.

Partial Stateless Architecture: Nodes hold only a portion of the state, with wallets and light clients caching the data they need themselves. This reduces storage costs, allows more users to run nodes, and decreases reliance on large RPC providers.

Ethereum’s long-term vision includes stateless validation, which aims to allow validators to verify blocks without storing the full state. While this reduces the burden on validators, it shifts the responsibility of data storage to specialized operators such as block producers, RPC service providers, MEV seekers, and block explorers—potentially creating new challenges in synchronization, censorship resistance, and network resilience.