Why Execution-Only Nodes Are a False Economy

Execution-only nodes rely on centralized RPC providers for data, creating a single point of failure and censorship. You cannot verify state transitions without the full history.

• Security Risk: Your node cannot independently verify the chain's canonical state.
• Censorship Vector: Reliant on providers like Infura/Alchemy, which have blacklisted addresses.
• Latency Penalty: Adds ~100-500ms of network hops for every state query.

Without a full mempool view, execution-only nodes are blind to transaction ordering and pending swaps, leading to massive hidden costs.

• Inefficient Routing: Misses optimal paths across DEXs like Uniswap, Curve, and Balancer.
• MEV Extraction: Becomes easy prey for searchers and builders, leaking value.
• Real Cost: Slippage and failed trades can erode >50% of theoretical yield in high-frequency strategies.

The ~80% reduction in storage costs is illusory. The operational overhead of managing partial node failures, data inconsistencies, and debugging off-chain dependencies outweighs the savings.

• DevOps Burden: Teams spend more time integrating and debugging external services.
• Protocol Risk: Inability to run a canonical node undermines decentralization claims, a red flag for VCs and auditors.
• Total Cost: Real expense shifts from predictable infra to unpredictable product and security debt.

Leading restaking and rollup frameworks like EigenLayer and AltLayer mandate full nodes for operators. This isn't an accident—it's a requirement for cryptographic security and slashing conditions.

• Cryptographic Proofs: Operators must validate, not just execute. This is non-negotiable for AVSs.
• Market Signal: $15B+ in restaked ETH is secured by nodes that verify the entire chain.
• Architectural Primitive: Full validation is the base layer for trustless interoperability and shared security.

Execution-only nodes are pure profit-maximizers. Without skin in the game from running consensus, they are incentivized to extract maximal value from every transaction at the user's expense. This creates a principal-agent problem where the node's interests directly oppose the user's.

• Sandwich attacks and frontrunning become the default, not the exception.
• Users pay for latency arbitrage instead of execution.
• Time-bandit attacks are trivial when you don't validate history.

When your execution layer is decoupled from a third-party consensus provider (like a centralized RPC), you inherit their single point of failure. A network partition or coordinated censorship event at the consensus layer renders your execution node useless.

• Zero liveness guarantees during provider outages.
• Unverifiable state transitions mean you must blindly trust the upstream data.
• This architecture recreates the web2 cloud dependency problem it claims to solve.

Bootstrapping an execution-only node requires a trusted source for the latest state. This process is slow, unreliable, and a major attack vector. Adversaries can feed poisoned state, causing the node to start from an invalid chain history.

• Days of sync time vs. minutes for a full node.
• No cryptographic proof of state correctness during initial sync.
• Creates a weakest-link security model dependent on the honesty of state providers like Infura, QuickNode, or Alchemy.

Execution without verification is just computation. An execution-only node cannot independently verify if transaction data is available, making it vulnerable to data withholding attacks. It will happily process a block whose data is published only to a subset of the network.

• Invalid state roots propagate because the node cannot challenge data absence.
• Enables fraud proofs without fraud—the system fails closed.
• This flaw is why Ethereum's roadmap tightly couples execution with consensus and data availability layers.

Hard forks and network upgrades are the ultimate coordination test. An execution-only node, reliant on external consensus, has no sovereign upgrade path. If its provider delays an upgrade, implements it incorrectly, or forks to a minority chain, the node is instantly orphaned.

• Forced chain splits without user consent.
• Version drift between execution and consensus clients causes consensus failures.
• Eliminates node operator agency, ceding all governance control to the RPC provider.

The promised savings are a mirage when accounting for total cost of ownership. The operational overhead of managing sync failures, MEV losses, and security incidents outweighs the marginal hardware savings of skipping consensus.

• Real cost is risk, not dollars per month.
• Lost revenue from missed MEV sharing (vs. running a full validator).
• Sunk engineering time debugging opaque third-party failures instead of a deterministic stack you control.