Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, emphasizes the advantages of implementing Verkle trees in Ethereum’s protocol. He highlights their potential to enable “stateless validator clients,” allowing staking nodes to operate with minimal hard disk space and achieve near-instant synchronization.
Buterin outlines a five-step development process for Ethereum, culminating in what he terms the platform’s endgame. This roadmap began with the activation of the Beacon Chain in September 2022, marking Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus.
Verkle trees are part of Ethereum’s development roadmap, falling under the Verge phase, the third stage of Ethereum’s evolution. This phase focuses on optimizing data storage and node size through the introduction of Verkle trees.
Buterin’s Ethereum Improvement Proposal documentation from 2022 provides technical insights into Verkle trees. They function similarly to Merkle trees but use vector commitments, leading to more efficient proof sizes.
Verkle trees play a crucial role in Ethereum’s journey towards statelessness, wherein nodes verifying blocks no longer need to store Ethereum’s state. This contributes to smaller proof sizes contained within each block and enables nodes to verify blocks using only the data within the block itself.
The implementation of Verkle trees promises several benefits, including lower hardware requirements for running Ethereum nodes, improved network decentralization, and faster node synchronization. However, achieving this will require various changes to the Ethereum protocol, including the adoption of new data structures, gas accounting models, cryptography primitives, and block-level fields.
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