Vitalik's Vision: A Simplified Breakdown of Ethereum's Future and The Purge

Vitalik was in rare form this past weekend as he took a break from his “Possible Futures” series to “engage with the community”. He’s just put out Part 5 “The Purge” and we’ve summarized it below. Here’s the links to all his originals and our summaries so far:

• Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 1: The Merge

  • The Edge Summary for Part 1

• Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge

  • The Edge Summary for Part 2

• Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 3: The Scourge

  • The Edge Summary for Part 3

• Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge

  • The Edge Summary for Part 4

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Vitalik Buterin’s latest post examines ways to reduce Ethereum’s long-term data and code bloat, balancing decentralization and minimal storage needs while preserving the blockchain’s core value of permanence. Ethereum currently faces two main challenges: historical data accumulation and protocol feature complexity. As every past transaction and account needs to be stored indefinitely, node storage requirements grow over time, adding to the complexity for both developers and users. Vitalik addresses these through “The Purge” in Ethereum’s roadmap, which aims to scale back unnecessary features and storage needs, ultimately ensuring Ethereum’s longevity.

Historical Data Expiry

Historical data—the record of all past transactions and blocks—requires substantial storage, approximately 1.1 terabytes for a full-synced Ethereum node. This amount keeps increasing as new transactions are added, impacting both node accessibility and sync time. Vitalik proposes history expiry: limiting the time each node stores complete historical data, currently around six months. After this period, nodes would rely on a decentralized storage network, using methods similar to torrent protocols. A peer-to-peer model would allow each node to store only a portion of history data, ensuring redundancy across the network. Through erasure coding, nodes can maintain data availability while reducing individual storage loads.

State Expiry

Another challenge is the growing “state,” which includes current account balances, contract code, and active storage. Unlike historical data, state objects (accounts or contracts) need to remain accessible indefinitely, which causes Ethereum’s state to grow at a rate of roughly 50GB per year. To counter this, Vitalik explores state expiry, where inactive state objects eventually expire. This approach involves structuring state storage so that if a piece of data goes unused, it can be temporarily removed and reinstated upon access via cryptographic proofs.

For example, a proposal called EIP-7736 suggests segmenting state data into small “chunks,” with each chunk stored if accessed recently, making long-term inactive data removable and later restorable. Such state expiry methods keep Ethereum decentralized by preventing unrestrained state growth, helping to avoid overwhelming users and validators with large storage demands.

Reducing Protocol Complexity

Vitalik also emphasizes protocol simplification. Over time, Ethereum’s codebase has accumulated unused or outdated features, which complicate the protocol and increase the risk of bugs. Initiatives like removing the SELFDESTRUCT opcode, which originally allowed contract termination to free storage space but introduced complexity, aim to streamline code without losing functionality. Additionally, Vitalik proposes transitioning to a simpler data encoding format, Standardized Serialization (SSZ), over the current RLP, further aligning Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers.

Long-Term Goals

Vitalik’s “Purge” approach also includes a vision of making Ethereum easier to manage on even small devices like mobile phones or smartwatches, by limiting nodes’ historical and state data requirements. While decentralization is a priority, these changes could let smaller users run nodes, reinforcing Ethereum’s security and accessibility.

This roadmap ultimately aims to make Ethereum lightweight, sustainable, and accessible to more users, without compromising its core principles of permanence and trustlessness. Through strategies like history and state expiry, and feature deprecation, Ethereum seeks to sustain itself in the long term while supporting its vast and growing decentralized ecosystem.

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