Ethereum Foundation Researcher: VOPS and some stateless nodes can reduce storage requirements by 25 times

ME News message: On April 1 (UTC+8), Ethereum Foundation researcher CPerezz presented the “validity-only partial statelessness” scheme (VOPS) at EthCC[9]. He pointed out that Ethereum’s state continues to grow, posing a long-term threat to decentralization and steadily raising the storage threshold for running full nodes. With VOPS, the node only needs to store four fields for each externally owned account (EOA): the storage address, Nonce, balance, and the code flag (codeFlag), and does not need to store the full contract code and the storage tree. This can reduce node storage requirements by 25 times. The scheme uses SNARK proofs generated by Verkle tree multi-proofs or a zkVM to verify state transitions, and updates the local account table via “State Diffs” without executing full block transactions. In addition, VOPS supports nodes running on low hardware configurations to maintain the mempool and connect to the FOCIL mechanism, ensuring that ordinary users’ participation in transactions is covered. CPerezz believes that VOPS is an intermediate stage on Ethereum’s path toward full statelessness, balancing the node’s ability for self-verification with a low participation threshold. (Source: Foresight News)