Vitalik Says Ethereum State Storage Issue Hard to Fully Resolve
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that even if users store data themselves, with only hashes on-chain and transactions containing only proofs, there is still a need to store and update data used to verify those proofs, which will ultimately amount to nearly the same volume as the full state.
Vitalik pointed out that there are solutions to the related issues, but they involve many components and require trade-offs compared to the current Ethereum; previously, DeFi writer marilyn100x.eth noted that EIP-8037 does not involve time-weighted rent but significantly increases the initial gas costs for new contracts, accounts, and storage slots to control state growth.
Developers and node operators in the market are facing pressure from state expansion. Vitalik is promoting protocol optimization through public discussions, benefiting long-term holders of ETH and Layer 2 projects, while full node operators and high-storage-cost DApps are under short-term pressure, with funds continuing to shift towards efficient state solutions.
Source: Public Information
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Vitalik Buterin has proposed various solutions to address state expansion since Ethereum's launch in 2015, including early discussions on State Rent and recent initiatives like Verkle Tree and EIP-7732. He has previously explored constrained storage models through proposals like Keyed Nonces, aiming to provide optimized storage for privacy and high-frequency use cases to alleviate general state pressure.
In terms of capital pathways, Vitalik is directing developer attention towards gas cost adjustments like EIP-8037 through resources from the Ethereum Foundation and public blogs, while integrating the protocol upgrade roadmap with Layer 2 scaling. The motivation is to maintain network decentralization and verifiability, avoiding state explosion that could raise node operation thresholds and compromise long-term security and adoption rates.
Similar to how Solana addressed early state growth through compression and parallel processing, and the modular storage explorations of chains like Cosmos, Vitalik is positioning Ethereum at the forefront of transitioning from a general monolithic chain to a hybrid constrained storage model, pushing the industry from indiscriminate state expansion to a phase of specialized optimization.
Structural judgment: Essentially a technical substitution. The growth of blockchain state is fundamentally a trade-off between verifying data and dynamic access, with the mechanism being that fully dynamic states are difficult to scale extremely. Vitalik aims to rebalance decentralization and scalability by introducing constrained specialized storage, separating high-frequency verification data from the general tree, thus replacing infinite expansion with gas upfront costs and structural trade-offs.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Users save storage, nodes still bear proof.
Higher upfront payments lead to slower subsequent expansion.
The more powerful the general, the more necessary the specialized.