Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin presented a new Road Map focused on increasing Gas Limits in Ethereum! Here are the details.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin today released a new proposal aimed at addressing the challenges of scaling Ethereum Layer 1 (L1), focusing on increasing gas limits without compromising the ability to run full nodes.

Vitalik Buterin Proposes 'Partially Stateless Nodes' to Help Scale Ethereum

Buterin's article addresses a long-standing debate in the Ethereum ecosystem: whether the L1 gas limit should be increased and how it could be increased, a move that could significantly enhance network efficiency but poses potential risks to decentralization and node accessibility.

Buterin wrote, "The most common criticism of increasing the L1 gas limit is that, beyond concerns about network security, it makes running a full node more difficult."

Running a full Ethereum node today requires approximately 1 terabyte of state data and 500 gigabytes of additional historical data storage, which is a cornerstone of the network's unreliable and censorship-resistant architecture. However, the high hardware requirements are making this system increasingly inaccessible to many users.

To alleviate this, Buterin has proposed various short- to medium-term upgrades, including EIP-4444, which will limit the necessity for nodes to store historical data to just 36 days. This will significantly reduce disk space requirements and shift the burden of long-term historical storage to a distributed data provider network.

In the medium term, Buterin advocated for stateless validation, a method that allows nodes to validate transactions and blocks without storing the entire blockchain state. According to Buterin, this could reduce node storage requirements by approximately 50%.

Additionally, it was proposed to change gas pricing to promote more efficient use of the blockchain, making data storage more expensive while reducing execution costs.

The most striking innovation in Buterin's roadmap is the idea of "partially stateless nodes". These will serve as a hybrid between full nodes and completely stateless clients. Instead of storing the entire state of the blockchain, these nodes will only hold selected subsets of data. This allows them to continue validating blocks and interacting with the chain while consuming much less storage space.

Buterin said, "Partially stateful nodes have the potential to increase the L1 gas limit by 10 to 100 times."

These nodes will continue to contribute to decentralization and security while providing much lighter participation in the network using stateless verification tools like zkEVMs or Merkle proofs to validate data integrity.