Ethereum is quietly accumulating problems that don’t show up in gas fees or transaction speed graphs, but that threaten the long-term health of the network. It’s called state hypertrophy. Ethereum Foundation stateless consensus researchers are now issuing a clear warning. As Ethereum continues to grow, it becomes harder to store, harder to deliver, and harder to decentralize.
In a recent proposal, the team laid out why this problem matters, how improvements in scaling may have unintentionally made things worse, and three concrete paths forward to prevent node operations from becoming an elite activity limited to only the largest infrastructure providers.
What Ethereum’s “state” really means
Ethereum status: Image source: Ethereum Foundation
Ethereum’s state is the sum of everything the network currently knows. This includes account balances, smart contract storage, and the bytecode that runs decentralized applications. It is a living memory of the chain.
This state powers an ecosystem that settles billions of dollars in value and orchestrates thousands of applications across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and enterprise use cases. The problem is simple but serious. The situation will only increase. Nothing will be deleted.
As more applications deploy the contract and more users interact with the contract, the state will permanently expand. Every complete node must store and serve this data, even if most of it is never touched again.
Why Ethereum state expansion threatens decentralization
Running a full Ethereum node is already expensive. Storage requirements continue to increase, synchronization times increase, and the data provided becomes more fragile as the chain ages. According to the foundation, when a nation becomes too large or too complex to provide services, the entire stack becomes more centralized and more vulnerable.
Recent scaling upgrades have inadvertently accelerated this trend. Layer 2 expansion, EIP-4844 protodunk sharding, and increased gas limits will further increase activity on Ethereum. More activity means more contracts, more writes to storage, and faster state growth.
This concern is not theoretical. Researchers are actively stress testing scenarios to understand when state size becomes a bottleneck, when nodes struggle to stay in sync with the beginning of the chain, and when client implementations start to fail under extreme storage loads.
If only a small group of well-funded operators can afford to run full nodes, Ethereum’s censorship resistance and neutrality will begin to weaken.
Stateless validation solves one problem, but creates another
Ethereum’s long-term roadmap includes statelessness, allowing validators to validate blocks without storing the full state. This significantly reduces the burden on validators and opens the door to higher throughput.
But if validators don’t store state, a new question arises: Who will?
In a stateless design, most of the history and active state may be maintained by specialized operators such as block builders, RPC providers, MEV searchers, and block explorers. This concentration creates new risks around censorship, availability during outages, and resilience to regulatory and external pressures.
The Stateless Consensus team is clear about the tradeoffs. Stateless validation improves scalability, but if not carefully designed, it could push Ethereum towards infrastructure centralization.
Three proposed paths to combating state bloat
To address this issue, researchers at the Ethereum Foundation have outlined three complementary approaches, each attacking nation-state growth from a different angle.
Status expiration date
State Expiry focuses on removing inactive data from active state. The team estimates that even though roughly 80% of Ethereum’s state hasn’t been touched in over a year, every node still needs to store it.
In this model, inactive data is expired from the active set, but can be revived later using cryptographic proofs. Two variants are being considered. Mark rarely used entries to expire with the option to revive them later. Other groups state in epochs, freezing older epochs while keeping the latest data active.
The goal is simple. It means to stop forcing all nodes to send data that no one is using.
state archives
State archives separate hot and cold states. Frequently accessed data remains fast and limited, while older data is stored in archival storage for historical validation.
This approach ensures that node performance remains relatively stable over time, rather than degrading as the chain ages. The operational load on most nodes remains manageable, even if the overall health continues to increase.
It also creates more distinct roles between performance-optimized nodes and history and research-optimized nodes.
partial statelessness
Partial statelessness allows a node to store only a subset of its state rather than all of it. Wallets and light clients cache dependent data, reducing dependence on centralized RPC providers.
This model reduces storage costs, widens participation, and makes it easier for individuals and small businesses to run nodes without large hardware investments.
The common goal of all three approaches is to reduce state as a performance bottleneck, reduce the cost of maintaining state, and make service delivery easier.
What the Ethereum Foundation will do next
The Foundation prioritizes solutions that can deliver real benefits today while remaining compatible with more ambitious protocol changes in the future. Current areas of focus include improving the Archive Node tool, strengthening the RPC infrastructure, and making it easier to run partially stateless nodes.
These efforts are intentionally practical. The team emphasized that they were chosen because they are immediately useful and upwardly compatible with Ethereum’s long-term roadmap.
Developers, node operators, and infrastructure teams are invited to participate in testing and discussion. Researchers have made it clear that this is not a problem that the Foundation can solve alone.
A proposal rather than a final decision
The Foundation was careful to stress that this study represents a proposal and does not represent a unified organization position. Ethereum protocol development involves a wide range of opinions and no single path is set in stone.
This openness is consistent with the Foundation’s recent efforts to communicate more clearly about its long-term protocol direction. Alongside state management research, Ethereum is also working on an interoperability layer that will make the Layer 2 network feel like a single chain, rolling out changes in leadership and R&D, adjusting its financial strategy, and moving to a bi-annual hard fork schedule with Fusaka.
Why this matters in the long term
The bloat of the Ethereum nation is not a headline-grabbing issue, but it is at the heart of Ethereum’s decentralization promise. If nodes become too expensive or complex to run, there is a risk that the network will become infrastructure-intensive, even though throughput and ease of use may increase.
The Ethereum Foundation’s message is simple and clear. Extending the chain without expanding its ability to securely store and serve data is not enough. How we manage the state of Ethereum over the next few years will determine who gets to participate, who controls the infrastructure, and how resilient the network remains under pressure.
The discussion has just begun, and the choices you make here will be reflected well beyond the next upgrade cycle.
