Verkle Trees

Ethereum is currently grappling with the challenge of its ever-expanding blockchain size. Clients need to store around 50 GB for the state alone, and over 150 GB including all Merkle proofs, which are increasing by roughly half that amount per year. As the state database increases in size, downloading, storing, and synchronizing data takes longer. Moreover, the costs of storing and accessing data on the blockchain can become prohibitively expensive, especially for smaller nodes and users wishing to participate in the network. The state's growth is permanent and relatively inexpensive, presenting another issue. Even if the cost of increasing the state is raised, there is no way to make someone pay for the actual impact on the network, which is eternal. Weak statelessness removes the need to store the entire state for verifying new blocks, enabling fully stateless block validation on Ethereum. This approach also allows validation on lightweight machines like Raspberry Pi (without SSD) a

Ethereum is currently grappling with the challenge of its ever-expanding blockchain size. Clients need to store around 50 GB for the state alone, and over 150 GB including all Merkle proofs, which are increasing by roughly half that amount per year. As the state database increases in size, downloading, storing, and synchronizing data takes longer. Moreover, the costs of storing and accessing data on the blockchain can become prohibitively expensive, especially for smaller nodes and users wishing to participate in the network. The state's growth is permanent and relatively inexpensive, presenti