Catenaa, Friday, December 26, 2025- Ethereum Foundation researchers warned that growing “state bloat” would create storage and performance challenges for node operators.
They also outlined three potential solutions to ease the burden.
The network’s state, which includes account balances, contract storage, and application code, continues to grow, making it increasingly costly and complex to operate full nodes.
The EF’s Stateless Consensus team said that if only a small set of sophisticated operators can maintain full state, Ethereum’s decentralization, censorship resistance, and resilience could weaken.
Scaling upgrades like Layer 2 expansion, EIP-4844 proto-danksharding, and gas limit increases have enabled more activity but accelerate state growth. Researchers are stress-testing when state size becomes a bottleneck, causes client failures, or makes following the chain difficult.
Three approaches aim to make node operation more manageable. State Expiry would remove inactive data from the active set, allowing users to revive it with proofs. State Archive separates hot, fast-access data from cold, historical data, keeping node performance stable as total state grows.
Partial Statelessness enables nodes to store only subsets of the state while wallets and light clients cache required data, lowering storage costs and dependence on major RPC providers.
The foundation said it prioritizes initiatives that deliver immediate benefits while preparing for long-term protocol changes.
These include archive improvements, enhanced RPC infrastructure, and making partial stateless nodes easier to run.
EF researchers invited developers, node operators, and infrastructure teams to contribute feedback and help test the proposals.
The update follows broader Ethereum development efforts, including the Interop Layer for Layer 2 integration, leadership and R&D reorganization, treasury adjustments, and the new semiannual hard-fork schedule initiated with Fusaka.
