Ethereum Foundation researcher: VOPS and partial stateless nodes can reduce storage requirements by 25 times

Foresight News reports that CPerezz, a researcher at Ethereum Foundation, introduced the “Validity-Only Partial Statelessness” solution (VOPS) at the EthCC[9] conference. He pointed out that the continuous expansion of Ethereum’s state has posed a long-term threat to decentralization by consistently raising the storage threshold for running full nodes. VOPS nodes only need to store four fields for each Externally Owned Account (EOA): address, Nonce, balance, and code flag (codeFlag), eliminating the need to store the complete contract code and storage tree, which can reduce node storage requirements by 25 times.

This solution uses Verkle tree multi-proofs or zkVM-generated SNARK proofs to verify state transitions and updates the local account table through “State Diffs,” without executing the full block transactions. In addition, VOPS enables low-hardware nodes to maintain the mempool and connect to the FOCIL mechanism, ensuring that ordinary users can participate in transaction inclusion. CPerezz believes that VOPS serves as an intermediate stage for Ethereum on the path to full statelessness, balancing nodes’ self-verification capability with a low participation threshold.