In a recent essay titled “Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge”, Vitalik Buterin claimed chain verification for the Ethereum Protocol should become take up easily computable resources.
The American-Canadian developer, co-founder of one of the largest cryptocurrency platforms Ethereum manifests from the statements of the following article where several participants confirmed that one of the key benefits of the blockchain technology is allowing users to run a node on their computer and validate the entire chain independently. The actors not affiliated with these ‘collaborative syndicates’ will automatically coalesce and continue a branching chain which is reasonably expected to stick to ‘old rules’ and all fully validated members will conform to that chain.
To discuss the practicality of running a node for both of the stakers and users, Buterin stated, “This is one of the fundamental differences between the blockchains and the centralized systems. But for this property to hold, running a fully-verifying node needs to be actually feasible for a critical mass of people.”
Presently, one can run a node from a consumer laptop but it is more of a hard task to do so, so, says Vitalik, “The Verge is about changing this and making fully verified chains so cheap that every mobile wallet, every browser wallet, and even every smartwatch does this by default.”
In its first iteration, the concept, “Verge” meant transferring Ethereum state storage to the Verkle tree which is a tree structure with more compact proofs that support state-less validation of Ethereum blocks. But this past year, Verge has become more flexible and so there are many ways to go.
The principle goals are summarised by Vitalik as these: 1. Stateless clients: Full validating clients, staking nodes don’t need storage for more than a few GBs. (Long term) Fully validated chain (consensus, execution) on a smart watch. Get some data, validate the SNARK, that’s it.
Vitalik also stated, “The long-term goal for Ethereum block verification is clear: you should be able to verify an Ethereum block by downloading the block, or perhaps even only small parts of the block with data availability sampling, and verifying a small proof that the block is valid.”
Buterin Vitalik also touched upon Stateless verification technology which allows nodes to verify blocks and state information without having the whole state. In stateless verification, a witness comes attached to each block, which contains (i) the values (eg. code, balances, storage) with their particular addresses in the state that other elements of the block will reach and (ii) a value by which it is guaranteed that those values are genuine.