First Release! Ethereum Releases Future Plans Part 5: Cleanup

Background

A major challenge facing Ethereum is the expansion and complexity of the blockchain protocol.

This issue is primarily reflected in two aspects:

1. Historical Data Bloat: All nodes must permanently store all historical data (such as transaction records, account information), which increases synchronization and storage burden.

2. Increasing Protocol Features: New features are continuously added, but old features are difficult to remove, leading to increased code complexity.

Cleanup Goals

1. Reduce Client Storage Requirements: Decrease or eliminate each node's permanent storage requirement for all historical data.

2. Reduce Protocol Complexity: Remove unnecessary features.

Cleanup Methods

1. Historical Data Cleanup

1) By establishing a distributed storage network, each node only needs to store a portion of historical data (similar to a seed network).

2) The proposed EIP-4444 introduces a one-year historical data storage limit and plans to gradually transition to a model that only retains the latest data.

2. State Cleanup

1) Store data through sharding, retaining only the most recently accessed data.

2) Address-Period State Cleanup: Introduce an expiration period for each address, storing only the recently accessed state within a specific period.

3. Feature Streamlining

Gradually remove seldom-used or unnecessary features (such as SELFDESTRUCT opcode, old transaction types, synchronization committee mechanisms, etc.)

Future Plans and Possible Radical Schemes

1. Radical Scheme: Move a large number of protocol features into contract code. For example, only retain the beacon chain as the base layer, with the execution environment as an independent rollup, similar to past proposals for an “execution environment,” but made possible through SNARKs technology.

2. Change Virtual Machine: For instance, use RISC-V or Cairo as the new Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and transpile EVM contracts into new virtual machine code, simplifying the protocol and improving efficiency.