Ethereum 80% redundant data drags down nodes, Foundation reveals three major mitigation plans

Ethereum Foundation researchers warn that “state bloat” is threatening network decentralization, with node storage costs skyrocketing, proposing three major solutions—state expiration, state archival, and partial statelessness—to address the crisis.

Ethereum faces state bloat crisis, node operation costs soar

(Source: Ethereum Foundation)

The Ethereum Foundation’s Stateless Consensus team recently issued an important warning, pointing out that the ever-expanding account records, contract storage, and bytecode on the network are becoming increasingly difficult for node operators to store, serve, and synchronize. This issue, known as “state bloat,” is threatening Ethereum’s long-term sustainability.

Ethereum’s “state” encompasses everything currently known on the network, including account balances, contract storage, and the code that drives applications. The foundation states that this system has become a critical component of global infrastructure, capable of “settling billions of dollars in value” and coordinating thousands of applications.

However, researchers note that Ethereum’s importance now presents a serious problem: this state will only continue to grow, not shrink. As data volume increases, running a full node becomes more expensive and fragile. The foundation bluntly states in a blog post: “If the state becomes too large, too centralized, or difficult to maintain, all these layers will become more fragile, more costly, and harder to decentralize.”

This warning is not alarmist. According to data provided by the foundation, over the past year, the Ethereum network has been continuously adding state data weekly, with growth not slowing down. Expansion improvements such as Layer 2 scaling, EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), and increased gas limits, while enabling more activity, have also accelerated state growth.

Decentralization under threat, high costs may squeeze out small nodes

Researchers warn that if only a few technically proficient operators can afford to store and maintain the full state, Ethereum’s resistance to censorship, neutrality, and resilience could weaken.

This concern touches on the core value proposition of blockchain. Ethereum’s trustworthiness relies on anyone being able to run a node to verify network state. But when node operation costs become too high, only large institutions and professional operators can afford it, leading the network toward centralization.

The foundation team states they are actively conducting stress tests to identify three critical thresholds: when will state growth become a scalability bottleneck? When will state size make it difficult for clients to keep up with the chain head? When will client implementations start to crash under extreme state sizes?

More specific data shows that approximately 80% of state data has not been updated for over a year, yet all nodes still must store this data today. This means node operators are paying storage costs for a large amount of “cold data” that is rarely accessed, which is clearly a resource waste.

Stateless verification presents new challenges, specialization may lead to centralization

Ethereum’s long-term roadmap includes “statelessness,” focusing on allowing validators to verify blocks without holding the full state. While this reduces the burden on validators and increases throughput, it also shifts the responsibility of storing historical states to a smaller, more specialized group.

Researchers write that in a stateless design, “most state may only be stored by: block proposers, RPC providers, and other specialized operators such as MEV searchers and block explorers.”

This raises a fundamental question: when validation becomes lighter but storage becomes more specialized, does Ethereum become more decentralized, or simply shift centralization risks from one layer to another?

The team admits that this centralization poses challenges for synchronization, resistance to censorship, and resilience against disruptions or external pressures. If only a few specialized operators hold the full state, these entities could become targets for regulatory pressure or technical attacks.

Three major solutions: expiration, archiving, partial statelessness

The Stateless Consensus team proposes three potential approaches to make state storage and service more manageable, each with its own trade-offs.

The first approach is state expiration, which removes inactive data from active sets while allowing users to recover this data via proofs. Considering that about 80% of state data has not been updated for over a year, this method has immediate practicality. Currently, two variants are under consideration: “mark, expire, and recover,” which tags and removes rarely used entries; and “multi-era expiration,” which rolls data into different eras and freezes older eras.

The advantage of this method is significantly reducing the amount of data nodes need to continuously store, but the challenge lies in designing reliable recovery mechanisms to ensure users can access expired data when needed.

The second approach is state archiving, separating hot state from cold state. Hot data remains limited and easily accessible, while cold data is stored for historical records and verifiability. Even as total state continues to grow, this can keep node performance “roughly stable over time rather than declining with chain age.”

This method is similar to traditional database cold/hot data separation strategies, and is relatively mature technically, but requires clear data classification standards and access mechanisms.

The final approach is partial statelessness, allowing nodes to store only subsets of the state, with wallets and light clients caching the data they depend on. This can reduce storage costs and dependency on primary RPC providers, expanding participation.

All three methods aim to “reduce state as a performance bottleneck, lower the costs of holding state, and make it easier to service.” However, each involves different technical complexities and centralization risk trade-offs.

Foundation invites community participation, emphasizes this is not final

The Ethereum Foundation states they are prioritizing practical measures that can deliver immediate benefits, while preparing for more ambitious future reforms. These include archiving development, improving RPC infrastructure, and simplifying operation of some stateless nodes. The team emphasizes that these measures are chosen because they are “immediately practical and backward compatible.”

Notably, the foundation’s top message highlights that this work is only a proposal, not a consensus position of the entire organization. “The content may not represent consensus; the Foundation is a broad organization with members from within Protocol and other fields,” the team wrote.

This cautious wording reflects Ethereum’s decision-making process: major technical changes require extensive community discussion and consensus, rather than being driven top-down by a single organization.

The foundation has invited developers, node operators, and infrastructure teams to participate in discussions. Researchers note: “As we iterate, we will continue sharing progress and unresolved issues. But we cannot solve this problem in isolation. If you are a client developer, node operator, infrastructure maintainer, Layer 2 developer, or simply interested in Ethereum’s long-term development, we invite you to participate: share your feedback on our proposals, join forum and call discussions, and help us test new approaches in practice.”

This update coincides with the Ethereum Foundation strengthening communication on long-term protocol development. Last month, the organization detailed a new “interoperability layer” project aimed at making Layer 2 ecosystems “feel like a single chain.” It has also experienced leadership changes, R&D restructuring, and financial adjustments, launching a new biannual hard fork plan with the release of Fusaka.

The state bloat issue highlights the fundamental challenge of blockchain scaling: how to improve performance while maintaining decentralization? The three major solutions proposed by the Ethereum Foundation each have their strengths and weaknesses, and the final choice—whether one approach or a combination—will depend on broad community discussion and technical validation. For investors and developers concerned with Ethereum’s long-term development, this debate is worth close attention.