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Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, proposed a solution to maintain trustless and censorship-resistant access to Ethereum while scaling the network. His proposal, shared on May 19th, focuses on making Ethereum’s layer-1 scaling more user-friendly for those operating personal nodes. Buterin emphasizes the critical role of independent node operators, warning that a market dominated by a few Remote Procedure Call (RPC) providers creates a significant risk of censorship. RPC providers enable wallets, users, and applications to interact with the blockchain without running their own nodes; however, many already exclude entire countries.
Buterin’s concern stems from the potential for these providers to deplatform or censor users under pressure. Beyond censorship, he cites the high cost of fully trustless cryptographic solutions and metadata privacy concerns as further justification for simplifying personal node operation. His proposed solution involves a novel node type: “partially stateless nodes.”
These nodes are designed to provide privacy-preserving access to blockchain data without the resource-intensive requirements of full nodes. As Ethereum scales and gas limits increase, running a full node demands more storage and bandwidth. Partially stateless nodes mitigate this by allowing users to verify the blockchain and serve local data while storing only a subset of the Ethereum state, tailored to individual needs.
Users could configure these nodes to store data relevant to their accounts, DeFi applications, and frequently used tokens like stablecoins and ETH. Data outside this subset would be excluded; queries beyond the stored data would either fail or be redirected to an RPC solution. The nodes validate blocks “statelessly,” meaning they don’t require the storage of full Merkle proofs or the entire blockchain history. They selectively update specific state components. This approach balances user control and resource efficiency, aiming to preserve decentralization and user privacy in a scaling Ethereum ecosystem.
