The Ethereum Foundation's Stateless Consensus team has unveiled three major technical proposals designed to address the network's growing 'state bloat' problem, which threatens decentralization by making node operation increasingly resource-intensive. The foundation warns that Ethereum's ever-expanding state—the collective record of all account balances, smart contract data, and bytecode—only grows and never shrinks, creating a critical bottleneck for network infrastructure.
The core issue identified is that running a full Ethereum node is becoming more expensive and fragile as the state accumulates. The foundation notes that if the state becomes too large or centralized, it weakens Ethereum's censorship resistance, neutrality, and resilience. Scaling improvements like Layer 2 expansion, EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), and gas limit increases have enabled more activity but also accelerate state growth, exacerbating the problem.
The three proposed pathways are: State Expiry, which would remove inactive data from the active set (noting that roughly 80% of the state hasn't been touched in over a year); State Archive, which separates 'hot' active data from 'cold' historical data to keep node performance stable over time; and Partial Statelessness, which allows nodes to validate blocks using compact cryptographic proofs without holding the entire multi-terabyte state locally.
The foundation emphasized that these are proposals, not immediate upgrades, and represent a strategic vision for long-term scalability. Implementation will require extensive research, community discussion, and testing. The team is prioritizing practical efforts that can deliver benefits today while preparing for more ambitious protocol changes, including archive development, RPC infrastructure improvements, and making it easier to run partial stateless nodes.
The foundation has invited developers, node operators, and infrastructure teams to participate in the discussion and testing process. A disclaimer in the announcement stressed that the work represents a proposal and not a unified organizational position, noting healthy diversity of opinion within the Ethereum Foundation.
