Researcher Says Ethereum Blocks May Crash Without Intervention

A blockchain researcher posted a 20-thread discussion on Twitter titled “Ethereum Roadmap: State Expiry” to share their sustainability vision for the second most adopted blockchain network.

Firstly, they argued that the number of resources necessary to keep the Ethereum network running increases as it attracts more users. They believe the burden on Ethereum will increase to infinity, eventually crushing the network.

(1/20) @ethereum Roadmap: State Expiry

As the World Computer attracts more use, the amount of resources needed to keep itself running increases. Today, that burden will increase to infinity, eventually crushing the network.

A roadmap to a sustainable Ethereum. pic.twitter.com/LNfEakxE2F

— Haym (@SalomonCrypto) November 3, 2022

Twitter user @SalomonCrypto continued, “Ethereum is the world computer, a single, globally shared computing platform in the space between a network of 1,000s of nodes.” They added that the nodes and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) work together to put Ethereum’s history on the blockchain records.

However, SalomonCrypto’s main point of contention is that Ethereum stores data of every account and entry back to the genesis block, which may be adequate with the current data size. They believe that without intervention, the spreadsheet size will grow to infinity and crash the entire decentralization system.

As a solution, SalomonCrypto suggested what they described as ‘State Expiry,’ where unused states become inactive. With State Expiry, the EVM’s state size is manageable as nodes will offload stale data to make room for new objects, and over time, the state size remains stable.

A part of the tweet read:

State expiry is a very exciting and essential area of Ethereum research. The bottom line is that we will need to implement some schemes. But things are relatively so easy. Picking a system is one thing; implementing it is another animal.

Overall, the idea is about changing the data structures that hold the state of the EVM, the molten core of Ethereum.

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