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In a mail Posted on October 23, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared details about “The Verge” upgrade, which aims to make it easier to run validator nodes.
A new upgrade for Ethereum to make running nodes easier
Buterin highlighted several issues currently facing the Ethereum network, in particular the high resource requirements needed to run Ethereum nodes.
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according to research From Paradigm, an Ethereum client needs to store “hundreds of gigabytes of state data” to verify transaction blocks. Furthermore, these data requirements increase by approximately 30GB each year, resulting in a decrease in the number of entities capable of running validation nodes.
With The Verge upgrade, running nodes can be made easier and less resource-intensive by leveraging two key innovations – stateless clients and encrypted SNARKs (Synoptic Non-Interactive Knowledge Arguments).
Stateless clients act as full validator nodes without the extensive hardware requirements associated with typical Ethereum blockchain clients.
Specifically, stateless clients only need a few gigabytes of storage space, as opposed to current requirements of over 1 terabyte (TB), which makes running a full node quite resource intensive.
Buterin posits that stateless verification “will make full-chain verification so computationally affordable that every mobile wallet, browser wallet, and even smartwatch does it by default.”
By reducing storage needs, stateless clients can democratize participation in the network, lower barriers to entry — especially for individual stakeholders — and enable more entities to secure and validate transactions on the Ethereum network.
Buterin encourages individual staking by lowering requirements
Buterin has recently Confirm The importance of making staking on Ethereum more accessible by lowering barriers to entry, such as the minimum amount of ETH required to stake and reducing bandwidth requirements.
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Additionally, Buterin discussed the advantages of SNARKs in enhancing cryptographic verification and defending against the potential threat of quantum computing.
SNARKs are sophisticated cryptographic proofs that enable users to verify blockchain data without downloading all of its data. “Download some data, check SNARK, and it’s done,” Buterin sums up.
In the detailed blog post, Buterin also highlighted Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4762, which deals with stateless gas cost changes in the context of stateless verification.
EIP-4762 seeks to adjust gas fees for resource-intensive cryptographic operations to maintain scalability and security of the Ethereum network. The proposal also introduces “multi-dimensional gas,” which imposes different gas fees on call data, account, and status access functions.
Ethereum’s native token, ETH, has attracted increasing institutional interest as adoption of the smart contract platform grows. A recent survey showed that nearly 70% of institutional investors do included In staking for ETH.
Despite the overall bullish outlook for Ethereum’s future, this optimism has yet to materialize translator In a big price movement for ETH. However, ETH holders are still long term Confident On the token’s long-term potential. At the time of writing, ETH is trading at $2,526, up 1.7% over the past 24 hours.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from Tradingview.com