The rapid expansion of local AI hardware has unexpectedly lowered one of Ethereum’s long-standing infrastructure barriers: the cost and storage demands of running a full node. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed the shift by sharing the specifications of his own Geth node, which after pruning occupied just 461 GiB.
High-performance workstations purchased by enthusiasts to run large language models privately already exceed the technical requirements for blockchain nodes. Systems built around GPUs such as the NVIDIA RTX 5090 or DGX Spark typically include high-speed NVMe drives for storing AI model weights, making an Ethereum node an additional background process rather than a dedicated hardware burden.
Ethereum’s infrastructure has also adapted. Thanks to EIP-4444 and optimizations to snap sync, a full node can now synchronize in about 12 hours, while disk requirements have fallen below 0.5 TB. The upcoming Glamsterdam hard fork is expected to accelerate synchronization at the base layer even further.
Buterin also highlighted a growing privacy-driven shift in how he interacts with Ethereum. He said he is increasingly replacing browser-based dApps with a command-line interface because web interfaces often hardcode calls to commercial RPC providers, allowing them to collect user metadata.
The next step in this direction is kohaku-cli, a command-line wallet being developed with support from the Ethereum Foundation. The project is designed to offer privacy out of the box and is already alpha-testing private balance-management features that integrate ZK protocols such as Tornado Cash, Railgun and Privacy Pools.
