Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum should become more friendly to users running local nodes

Vitalik Buterin posted a suggestion on making Ethereum more friendly to users running local nodes. His latest proposition is linked to attempts to scale the L1 chain, which still suffers from high gas prices and growing demand for data. 

Vitalik Buterin proposed changes to Ethereum aiming to make the network more friendly to users running nodes. Buterin stated it’s important to run a full node and a personal RPC server, hoping to bring more users onboard with Ethereum nodes. 

Currently, running a node is restricted and resource-heavy. The chain has 10,051 active nodes as of May 19. The full data of the chain is at 1,312 GB and growing. In the past year, with all active DeFi and L2 verifications, the data load for Ethereum has grown by over 20%, with a trend to preserve that pace. 

The Ethereum network still hinges on data centers in developed countries, with around 30% of consensus and execution nodes located in the USA and concentrated on the East Coast. Germany is the second key location for ETH nodes. 

New proposal offers lighter versions of RPC nodes

The bottleneck for Ethereum is also the availability of RPC providers. A smaller pool of providers may resort to censorship, as currently some RPC nodes exclude entire countries, noted Buterin in his longer explanation of eventual updates. 

Ethereum may add a new type of node with a lower data requirement, which could verify transactions and further decentralize the network. Some users may run partial-state nodes, storing contracts and transactions only relevant to their own use cases. 

The end goal is to encourage smaller players to run RPC nodes, removing the risk of monopolizing Ethereum between big players. 

The update on L1 scaling arrives at a time when Ethereum handles 1.38M transactions per day, following renewed interest in DeFi and ETH trading. The chain has disproven claims of being dead or displaced, leading to calls for more relevance and L1 speed. 

The message from Buterin failed to recover the ETH price, which dropped to $2,375.66, just days after holding above $2,500.

Vitalik Buterin puts priority status on EIP-4444

One of the steps to making Ethereum easier for node operators is to prioritize EIP-4444. The end goal is to have nodes that store full data for only 36 days. This will reduce storage requirements, one of the main obstacle to running even more nodes. 

The EIP-4444 changes will affect the entire network, with clients no longer serving some of the data that is older than a year through P2P transactions. Clients may locally prune historical data. 

Full RPC nodes will coexist with archive nodes, which have provided the large and ever-expanding history of the network. The chain has envisioned up to $1 trillion in assets, including ETH, stablecoins, tokens, and NFTs, as well as tokenized securities, requiring reliable historical nodes. On the other hand, verification and short-term transaction processing may become easier without the outsized demand for storage. 

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