A leap towards efficient data management

• Introduction of history expiration via EIP-4444 to limit historical data storage.
• Nodes can prune over-a-year-old historical blocks.
• Historical data is only necessary for peer synchronization or specific requests.

Since the release of the hugely celebrated Dencun upgrade in mid-March, which introduced EIP-4844, also referred to as proto-danksharding, Ethereum has been in the news. In a recent update, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, recently released more information about the protocol’s future developments. It guarantees protocol simplification and lowers node resource loads. He refers to this as the Purge.

The Purge plays a crucial role in the Ethereum transition by focusing primarily on onboarding history expiration through EIP-4444. Its main objective is to restrict the amount of historical data stored. In addition, this stage will greatly reduce the hard disk requirements for node operators and lower the technical debt of the Ethereum protocol.

With the Dencun hard fork, the Ethereum improvement proposal (EIP)-6780 was introduced, streamlining the protocol by removing a significant portion of the “SELFDESTRUCT” code functions. As a network architect, I achieved increased storage slots for each Ethereum block. To eliminate the “SELFDESTRUCT” code in the future, Buterin has high hopes for the new EIP (the EIP-4444).

Nodes can prune historical blocks that are over a year old, only needing them when syncing with the latest chain head or when developers request them. In addition, it ensures that fully synchronized nodes don’t need historical data that’s more than 365 days old. According to Buterin, implementing EIP-4444 could significantly improve the decentralization of Ethereum’s nodes. This could lead to storing multiple copies of each historical piece throughout the network.

Ethereum co-founder also mentioned that Geth, an Ethereum-based execution client, has undergone major changes, including removing a significant amount of code and discontinuing support for pre-merge (PoW) networks. According to him, after implementing Dencun, there will be an 18-day storage window for blobs, which will decrease node data bandwidth to 50 gigabytes.

Buterin touched upon the value of removing precompiled Ethereum contracts, as they have been used to implement advanced forms of cryptography that go beyond the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) capabilities. Nevertheless, the contract function has recently experienced a decline in demand, leading to it becoming a significant cause of consensus bugs and a major challenge for new EVM implementations, pointed out the co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine.