Ethereum Foundation Proposed Three Solutions for One of ETH’s Biggest Problems

Ethereum Foundation (EF) researchers have warned that the network’s ever-growing data load (“state bloat”) is becoming a serious problem for Ethereum nodes.

The Stateless Consensus team within the foundation noted that accounts, smart contract data, and application code held on the network require more and more storage space each day, making it more difficult to run nodes.

Ethereum’s “state” encompasses all information regarding the network’s current condition, including account balances, contract storage, and the code that powers applications. According to EF, Ethereum is now a global infrastructure handling billions of dollars in value and running thousands of applications. However, this scale brings with it a significant problem: State is constantly growing and never shrinking.

Researchers note that as state grows, running full nodes becomes both more expensive and more fragile. A blog post shared by EF states that if state becomes too large or can only be managed by a limited number of powerful operators, Ethereum’s decentralized nature could be compromised.

The widespread adoption of Layer 2 solutions, along with scaling measures like EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding) and increased gas limits, has boosted network processing capacity. However, according to EF researchers, these advancements are also accelerating state growth.

The team noted that allowing only a small number of large and technically advanced operators to store and serve the full state poses a risk to Ethereum’s censorship resistance, neutrality, and network security. Therefore, researchers are actively testing when state size becomes a scaling barrier and how node software behaves under excessive data load.

Ethereum’s long-term plans include stateless validation, which aims to allow validators to verify blocks without storing the full state. This approach reduces the burden on validators while shifting the responsibility of data storage to a narrower group.

According to EF, in a stateless architecture, the majority of state will be held by specialized operators such as block producers, RPC service providers, MEV seekers, and block explorers. Researchers say this could create new challenges in terms of synchronization issues, censorship risk, and resilience to external pressures.

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

State Expiration: The goal is to remove long-unused data from the active state and restore it with evidence if needed. According to EF, approximately 80% of the current state has not been used for more than a year.

State Archiving: The plan is to separate frequently used “active” data from rarely accessed “archive” data. This aims to prevent node performance from declining as the chain ages and to ensure the system remains more stable over time.

Partial Stateless Architecture: Nodes are envisioned to hold only a portion of the state, with wallets and light clients caching the data they need themselves. This approach aims to reduce storage costs, allowing more users to run nodes and decreasing reliance on large RPC providers.

*This is not investment advice.