The Ethereum network is nearing a critical infrastructure bottleneck, sparking a heated debate among developers over how to handle the blockchain’s rapidly increasing “state size.”
At the center of the controversy is a proposed network upgrade, EIP-8037. This is aimed at curbing data bloat by significantly increasing initial gas costs for developers introducing new smart contracts and storage slots.
There appears to be an economic flaw in Ethereum’s current design. Developers pay a one-time fee to write data to the blockchain, but network nodes must pay ongoing costs to store that data forever.
State storage issues
Ethereum’s “state” is a snapshot of all current account balances, smart contract code, and data stored on the network. Unlike transaction history, which can be archived, state must be kept active and easily accessible by nodes to process new transactions.
According to network researcher @marilyn100x, the current model is unsustainable. If the network is operating at the 100 million gas limit, Ethereum adds approximately 553 MiB of new persistent data every day. This equates to approximately 197 GiB of new state data per year.
Ethereum currently stands at around 390 GiB. At current growth rates, networks are projected to reach a critical “danger zone” of 650 GiB within 1.6 years. Too large a state significantly increases the hardware requirements to run a node and threatens to price out the average participant and centralize the network.
To prevent networks from reaching this limit, developers proposed EIP-8037. This proposal would act as a deterrent by significantly increasing the initial cost of gas required to create new contracts, accounts, and storage slots instead of time-weighted rents. Developers are encouraged to write more efficient code and avoid treating Ethereum’s base layer as a cheap database.
Vitalik Buterin also participated.
The anticipated significantly higher implementation costs have led developers to seek alternative workarounds. At X (formerly Twitter), developer Lee Ash proposed to ease the burden on users. “What would happen if everyone stored their data? And would the blockchain only store hashes? And would transactions only contain proofs?”
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin explained the technical limitations of cryptographic proofs in this context and quickly scrapped the idea as a short-term solution.
“The problem is that the data that checks the certification needs to be stored and updated, but in any case it ends up being about the same size as the state,” Buterin replied.
Buterin acknowledged that alternative state management solutions exist, but cautioned that they are highly complex. “There are solutions, but there are many moving parts, all of which require trade-offs with Ethereum as it currently stands,” he concluded.
