Vitalik's new Ethereum scaling proposal: Increase Gas Limit to drop node requirements and create partial stateless nodes.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a new proposal that balances L1 scaling and node ease of use, strengthening decentralization and user privacy. (Synopsis: analyst Bernstein sees Ethereum skyrocketing: stablecoins, L2, the lucky ones with short covering) (Background supplement: Ethereum announces the launch of the "One Trillion US Dollar Security Program", vowing to become the cornerstone of digital civilization) Vitalik Buterin proposed a new scaling direction on May 19, 2025 to cope with the challenges of Layer 1 scaling, that is, it is increasingly difficult to run full nodes. The main purpose of this proposal is to balance the improvement of transaction capacity with the ease of use of individual nodes, strengthen user privacy and anti-censorship capabilities. The dilemma of Ethereum L1 scaling and the risk of node centralization L1 increases the demand for full node hardware, storage, and network speed by increasing the gas limit, raising the threshold for participation and threatening network decentralization. Users rely more on centralized RPC service providers, affecting data autonomy. Existing privacy schemes such as ZK-EVM, PIR still have cost and metadata leakage limitations. Lowering the threshold for personal nodes is critical to maintaining decentralization. Towards a lightweight node Vitalik proposed that the short-term key is to promote EIP-4444, the node only retains about 36 days of recent data, greatly reduces the need for hard disks, and establishes a distributed historical data storage scheme. Adjust gas pricing to increase storage costs, reduce execution costs, and encourage efficient data usage. The medium-term goal is to achieve stateless authentication and further simplify RPC node operations. Innovative concept: partial stateless nodes (Partial stateless Nodes) Vitalik also proposed "partial stateless nodes" to cope with the scenario where the L1 gas limit will be greatly increased in the future. The core is a node that does not need to store the full state Merkle branch, but only stores a subset of the state per user configuration. Nodes can still verify the validity of the whole chain ( maintain some of the latest state through stateless verification or ZK-EVM), directly respond to local RPC requests, and provide trustless private data access. Out-of-scope requests can fail or be traced. Users can flexibly configure a subset of the stored state, such as excluding junk contracts, including EOA/SCW and common token status, and even through on-chain contract management, only the original value is saved. Specific designs such as Validity-Only Partial Statelessness (VOPS) require only about 8.4 GB of minimum state data, which lowers the hardware threshold and enhances scalability. Far-reaching implications for Ethereum? The "partially stateless nodes" proposed by Vitalik are expected to significantly lower the operational threshold, enable more people to run nodes, strengthen decentralization, and improve user privacy and censorship resistance (data is obtained locally, free from monitoring and filtering). This will also optimize the L2 and dApp development environment, and related upgrades such as the Pectra hard fork are also advancing. In the long run, Account Abstraction VOPS (AA-VOPS) and the discussion that EVM may be replaced by RISC-V are all roadmaps for both decentralization and scalability in Ethereum. Read more: Technology What is Vitalik's RISC-V? Why CKB-VM Why RISC-V? Vitalik proposed to include EIP-4444, stateless verification and "partial stateless nodes" to balance scalability and decentralization for Ethereum, it can be seen that after announcing "return Ethereum to the spirit of cryptopunk", he pushed for more users to reduce the cost of running personal nodes and participate in the network safely and privately. Related stories PoS is safer? Developers: Attacks on Ethereum cost far more than Bitcoin's $10 billion Solana single-day revenue exceeds all L1 and L2 combined, 3 times suppresses Ethereum "Vitalik Ethereum Expansion New Proposal: Gas Limit Increases Reduce Node Demand and Create Some Stateless Nodes" This article was first published in BlockTempo's "Dynamic Trend - The Most Influential Blockchain News Media".