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

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