Vitalik Buterin has proposed a new node concept to increase Ethereum’s gas limit to 100x

What’s new? Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a new roadmap to address the challenges of scaling the underlying Layer 1 (L1) blockchain through higher gas limits, including a concept of node operation called “partially stateless nodes.” “The most common criticism of increasing the L1 gas limit, beyond concerns about network safety, is that it makes it harder to run a full node,” Buterin wrote.

Buterin’s proposal

What else is known? Running a full node is valuable because it offers a “trustless, censorship-resistant and privacy-friendly way” to gain access to the chain, the developer added.

To increase the gas limit on the Ethereum underlying blockchain without affecting the operation of full nodes, Buterin suggested implementing the EIP-4444 improvement of setting a 36-day storage limit to reduce the amount of data for other participants on the network.

Running a full Ethereum node requires storing the entire blockchain (~1 TB for state and ~500 GB for history). EIP-4444 will offload historical data storage, making nodes lighter.

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Buterin’s other short-term proposals include creating a distributed repository for historical data and adjusting gas prices to make storage more expensive and execution less expensive.

As a medium-term roadmap change, Buterin highlighted “stateless verification,” which would allow nodes to interact with the blockchain without maintaining the Merkle branches used to verify data integrity.

According to Buterin, this could reduce data storage needs by about 50%, making nodes much lighter.

He also introduced a new concept called “partially stateless nodes” that can increase the gas limit of the underlying blockchain by 10-100 times.

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The new type of nodes will check blocks and the entire blockchain without storing all the data, using Ethereum’s zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkEVM). They will be programmed to store a selected subset of data instead of the full set, and still be able to execute queries related to the data in the selected portion.

The gas limit in Ethereum defines the network’s ability to process transactions. It is the basic unit of measurement of the computational effort required to execute transactions or smart contracts.

Each operation on the Ethereum network requires a certain amount of gas. This mechanism ensures that users pay for the resources they consume and prevents attackers from overloading the network.

Thus, the gas limit defines the maximum amount of gas that all transactions within a single block can consume. This limit is a critical protection measure against network congestion and potential DoS attacks.