Statelessness eliminates state bloat. Full nodes today must store the entire chain state, a multi-terabyte dataset that creates massive hardware requirements and centralization pressure. Stateless clients will verify blocks using cryptographic proofs instead of local storage.
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Stateless Ethereum and Cheaper Infrastructure
The Verge's statelessness paradigm eliminates the need for full state storage, collapsing node costs and unlocking hyper-scalability. This is the most consequential infrastructure shift since The Merge.
introduction
THE STATE PROBLEM
Introduction
Statelessness is the fundamental architectural shift that will collapse Ethereum's infrastructure costs by orders of magnitude.
Verkle Trees enable stateless proofs. They replace Ethereum's Merkle Patricia Tries, which generate proofs too large for practical use. Verkle Trees produce constant-sized proofs, making witness data small enough to fit in a single block.
Infrastructure costs will plummet. Services like Alchemy and Infura spend millions on node operations, costs passed to developers. Stateless clients reduce the hardware spec from enterprise-grade servers to consumer hardware, enabling permissionless node operation at scale.
Evidence: The current Ethereum state is ~1.2TB and grows by ~50GB/month. Post-Verkle, a stateless client proof for a block is projected to be under 1.3MB, a >99.9% reduction in data required for verification.
key-trends
STATELESSNESS & VERKLE TREES
The Scaling Trilemma's Hidden Tax: State Growth
Ethereum's state, the ledger of all accounts and smart contracts, grows infinitely, imposing a heavy tax on node operators and limiting scalability. Statelessness is the architectural shift to break this constraint.
01
The Problem: The State Bloat Tax
Full nodes must store the entire state (~1TB+), requiring expensive SSDs and high RAM. This centralizes infrastructure, raises sync times to weeks, and makes running a node prohibitively expensive for most.
- Barrier to Entry: High hardware costs deter new validators.
- Sync Hell: New nodes cannot quickly join the network.
- Centralization Pressure: Only well-funded entities can participate.
1TB+
State Size
Weeks
Sync Time
02
The Solution: Verkle Trees
Verkle Trees replace Merkle Patricia Tries, enabling stateless clients. Witnesses (proofs) become small enough (~150 bytes) to be included in blocks, allowing nodes to validate without storing state.
- Witness Size: Proofs shrink from ~1MB to ~150B.
- Stateless Validation: Light clients can fully verify execution.
- Paving the Way: Essential for Verkle-based EIPs like 6800.
150B
Witness Size
~1000x
Efficiency Gain
03
The Architecture: Stateless Ethereum
A paradigm where execution clients (like Geth) no longer need a local state copy. Block proposers provide succinct proofs (witnesses) for all state accesses, verified by the network.
- Role Separation: Proposers become state providers; validators become pure verifiers.
- Bandwidth over Storage: Network trades storage load for increased bandwidth (a more scalable resource).
- Foundation for Scaling: Enables higher gas limits and more complex L1 execution.
0 Local
State Storage
>100M
Gas Limit Target
04
The Enabler: History Expiry (EIP-4444)
Prunes historical data older than one year from execution clients, capping perpetual storage growth. Clients would retrieve old data from decentralized networks like Portal Network or BitTorrent.
- Bounded Growth: Node storage requirements become predictable.
- Decentralized Archive: Historical data remains available via P2P networks.
- Critical Prerequisite: Must be deployed alongside statelessness for full effect.
1 Year
Data Retention
-90%
Storage Growth
05
The Competitor: Solana's Singular State
Solana's architecture embraces a single, global state optimized for parallel execution via Sealevel. Validators use high-performance hardware (128GB+ RAM, NVMe) as a scaling trade-off.
- Different Trade-off: Prioritizes performance over hardware decentralization.
- State Compression: Programs like state compression on Solana reduce NFT minting costs to ~$0.01.
- Contrast: Highlights Ethereum's path of decentralized verification vs. Solana's high-performance monolith.
128GB+
Validator RAM
$0.01
Mint Cost
06
The Endgame: Cheaper, More Robust L1
Statelessness transforms Ethereum's economic model. Node operation becomes cheaper and more accessible, reducing reliance on centralized infrastructure providers like Infura.
- Infrastructure Democratization: Lowers barrier to running a node globally.
- L1 Scalability Boost: Enables sustainable increases in throughput and gas limits.
- Foundation for the Future: Critical for full danksharding and a rollup-centric ecosystem.
10x+
Node Accessibility
Cheaper L1
End Result
deep-dive
THE STATE CRISIS
From Merkle to Verkle: The Cryptographic Engine
Verkle Trees are the cryptographic prerequisite for Stateless Ethereum, which will slash node hardware requirements by orders of magnitude.
Merkle Proofs are too large. A standard Ethereum state proof is ~1 KB, which bloats transaction size and network overhead. This makes stateless clients, which don't store the full state, impractical for scaling.
Verkle Trees use Vector Commitments. They replace Merkle's hashes with polynomial commitments, shrinking proofs to ~150 bytes. This enables witness sizes small enough to be included in every block header.
Statelessness flips the infrastructure model. Nodes no longer need terabytes of SSD storage for state. Light clients and execution clients like Geth or Erigon verify the chain using compact proofs, not local data.
The bottleneck shifts to proof generation. Specialized prover networks, akin to EigenLayer AVSs or AltLayer rollups, will emerge to compute these proofs off-chain, creating a new market for compute.
STATELESSNESS & INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS
Node Economics: Before and After The Verge
Quantifying the operational shift for node runners from full-state execution to stateless verification.
| Metric / Capability | Full-State Node (Pre-Verge) | Stateless Verifier (Post-Verge) | Stateless Builder (Post-Verge) |
|---|---|---|---|
State Storage Requirement |
| < 1 GB (RAM) | < 1 GB (RAM) |
Hardware Entry Cost (Annualized) | $1,200 - $2,500 | $200 - $500 | $500 - $1,200 |
Bandwidth Consumption (Peak) |
| < 10 Mbps |
|
Sync Time (From Genesis) | 5 - 10 days | < 1 hour | < 1 hour |
Can Propose Blocks | |||
Can Validate Blocks (Execute) | |||
Primary Revenue Source | MEV, Block Rewards | Staking Rewards | MEV, Builder Fees |
Required Trust Assumption | None (Self-Validating) | Relies on Honest Builder Majority | Relies on Honest Proposer Majority |
counter-argument
THE COST-BENEFIT
The L2 Counterargument: "Why Bother?"
Stateless Ethereum's primary value is reducing the hardware burden for nodes, but Layer 2s already achieve this with greater operational simplicity.
L2s already solved scaling. Rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism provide cheap transactions by outsourcing execution. Their security model relies on Ethereum's data availability, which is the core resource constraint Statelessness addresses.
Statelessness is a node-level optimization. It reduces the state growth problem for individual validators, not the network's aggregate data. L2s, by design, minimize their on-chain state footprint, making them a cleaner architectural solution for application scaling.
The operational complexity is immense. Deploying Verkle trees and a new state model requires a hard fork and breaks all existing tooling. Migrating to an L2 stack like Arbitrum Nitro or a zkEVM is a simpler engineering lift for most teams.
Evidence: Arbitrum processes over 1 million transactions daily while posting minimal calldata to L1. The cost to run an Arbitrum node is a fraction of a full Ethereum archival node, achieving Stateless Ethereum's goal without altering the base layer.
protocol-spotlight
STATELESS INFRASTRUCTURE
Builders in the Verge: Early Movers and Enablers
The shift from stateful to stateless verification is the most profound architectural change in Ethereum's history, enabling ultra-light clients and radically cheaper L2s.
01
The Problem: State Growth is a Ticking Bomb
Ethereum's state grows by ~50 GB/year, forcing nodes into centralization and making L2 data availability prohibitively expensive.\n- State Bloat: Full nodes require >1 TB SSDs, pricing out home operators.\n- L2 Cost Driver: >90% of rollup cost is paying Ethereum for state storage via calldata.
>1 TB
Node Size
>90%
L2 Cost
02
Verkle Trees: The Cryptographic Engine
Replaces Merkle Patricia Tries with vector commitments, collapsing proof sizes from ~300 kB to ~150 bytes. This is the prerequisite for statelessness.\n- Witness Size: Enables light clients with sub-1 MB proofs.\n- Validator Scaling: Allows stateless validators, removing the main barrier to increasing the gas limit.
~150 B
Proof Size
1000x
Improvement
03
EIP-4444: The State Expiry Mandate
Forces nodes to prune historical data older than 1 year, capping the active state size. Clients must serve old data via P2P networks like Portal Network.\n- Node Requirements: Cuts SSD needs from TB to ~100 GB.\n- New Primitive: Enables historical data markets, creating incentives for decentralized storage.
~100 GB
Active State
1 Year
Retention
04
The Portal Network: Stateless Client Layer
A decentralized network of ultra-light clients that collectively store and serve the full Ethereum history, enabling true stateless verification.\n- Architecture: Distributed Hash Table (DHT) shards data across participants.\n- Endgame: Enables phone-based Ethereum nodes and trust-minimized bridges for rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism.
~20 MB
Client Size
P2P
Data Layer
05
zkEVM Implications: The Final Form
Statelessness is a natural fit for zk-based systems. A zkEVM proof can inherently include a Verkle proof, verifying state transitions without holding the state.\n- Synergy: Combines zk-SNARKs (computational integrity) with Verkle proofs (state integrity).\n- Ultra-Light Clients: Verifies the chain with a cryptographic proof, not gigabytes of data.
ZK+VP
Proof Stack
Trustless
Verification
06
The Enabler: Cheaper, More Secure L2s
Stateless Ethereum reduces L2 data publishing costs by >10x, making volition and validium architectures economically viable. This benefits Starknet, zkSync, and Polygon zkEVM.\n- Cost Structure: Shifts cost from Ethereum calldata to prover computation.\n- Security Trade-off: Enables data availability on Celestia or EigenDA without massive security loss.
>10x
Cheaper DA
Volition
Enabled
future-outlook
THE INFRASTRUCTURE SHIFT
The 2025-2026 Horizon: A Cambrian Explosion of Nodes
Statelessness and verifiable execution will collapse node costs, enabling a new wave of specialized infrastructure.
Statelessness eliminates state bloat. Full nodes will no longer store the entire historical state, instead verifying state proofs from a decentralized network of Verkle tree provers. This reduces hardware requirements from terabytes to gigabytes.
Light clients become first-class citizens. With zk-SNARK-based state proofs, mobile wallets and IoT devices will verify execution trustlessly. This breaks the validator-miner monopoly on chain access.
Specialized prover networks emerge. Companies like Succinct and RISC Zero are building markets for proving general compute. Expect EigenLayer AVSs to offer cost-optimized proving services for specific applications.
Evidence: Node count will 10x. The current ~10,000 Ethereum consensus nodes is a bottleneck. Post-verge, lightweight nodes verifying proofs will proliferate, creating a more resilient and permissionless network layer.
takeaways
STATELESS ETHEREUM & CHEAPER INFRASTRUCTURE
TL;DR for Time-Poor Architects
The core problem: Ethereum's state growth is a tax on node operators, limiting decentralization and inflating costs for everyone. Here's the path to fixing it.
01
The Problem: State Bloat is a Centralizing Force
The Ethereum state grows by ~50 GB/year, forcing node requirements higher. This pushes validation to centralized providers like Infura, creating systemic risk.\n- Node Costs: Requiring 2TB+ SSDs and high RAM.\n- Sync Times: Initial sync can take days to weeks, a major barrier to entry.
2TB+
Node Storage
50 GB/yr
State Growth
02
The Solution: Verkle Trees & Stateless Clients
Replace Merkle Patricia Tries with Verkle Trees, enabling stateless validation. Clients verify blocks without storing the full state, using small witness proofs (~1-2 KB).\n- Node Efficiency: Requirements drop to ~100 MB of state.\n- Decentralization: Lowers hardware bar, enabling millions of light clients.
~100 MB
Client State
1-2 KB
Witness Size
03
The Immediate Win: EIP-4444 (History Expiry)
Clients can prune historical data older than 1 year. This cuts storage needs by ~90% and simplifies client software.\n- Storage Cut: From ~15TB to ~1.5TB for archive nodes.\n- P2P Boost: Enables a decentralized history network (like Portal Network) for on-demand data.
90%
Storage Cut
1 Year
Expiry Window
04
The Infrastructure Impact: RPC & L2 Cost Plunge
Statelessness transforms RPC provider economics. Services like Alchemy, QuickNode see ~10x reduction in state management overhead. L2s (Arbitrum, Optimism) inherit cheaper data availability and verification.\n- RPC Costs: Potential for ~50-70% price reduction.\n- L2 Finality: Faster and cheaper fraud/validity proofs.
10x
Ops Efficiency
50-70%
Cost Reduction
05
The New Primitive: Portal Network
A decentralized peer-to-peer network for serving expired history and state data. Think BitTorrent for Ethereum history. Removes the last dependency on centralized infra.\n- Architecture: Light clients can query data from the swarm.\n- Resilience: Eliminates single points of failure for historical data.
P2P
Architecture
0
Central Trust
06
The Bottom Line: A Truly Scalable Settlement Layer
Stateless Ethereum isn't just about cheaper nodes. It's the prerequisite for massively scalable rollups and secure light client bridges. It fixes the economic model for infrastructure, making Ethereum sustainable at 10k+ TPS.\n- Endgame: Enables ZK-EVMs and volitions to thrive.\n- Timeline: Verkle Trees target ~2025/26.
10k+
Sustainable TPS
2025/26
Target
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