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 introduced the “validity-only stateless” approach (VOPS) at the EthCC[9] conference. He pointed out that the Ethereum state’s ongoing bloat has posed a long-term threat to decentralization, constantly raising the storage requirements for running full nodes. VOPS nodes only need to store four fields for each externally owned account (EOA): the storage address, Nonce, balance, and code flag (codeFlag). They do not need to store the full contract code and storage trie, which can reduce node storage requirements by 25 times. The proposal uses SNARK proofs generated via Verkle tree multi-proofs or a zkVM to verify state transitions, and updates the local account table via “State Diffs,” without executing complete block transactions. In addition, VOPS supports nodes with low hardware configurations to maintain the mempool and integrate the FOCIL mechanism, ensuring that ordinary users’ participation in transactions is included. CPerezz believes that VOPS is an intermediate step on Ethereum’s path to fully stateless operation, balancing nodes’ autonomous verification capability with a low participation threshold. (Source: Foresight News)