Stateless Ethereum Nodes for Lower Storage and Faster Validation
Summary
The document introduces Ress, a stateless Ethereum execution client built on Reth. Instead of keeping the full account and contract state, a stateless node receives state witnesses from peers, checks them against the prior state commitment, and executes blocks. This trades storage requirements for additional network data, with the stated aim of reducing node costs and potentially improving decentralization.
The proof of concept reports a 14 GB disk requirement and successful Holesky testnet attestations, with 99th-percentile validation under one second per block. Ress reduces witness size by storing contract bytecode locally rather than transmitting it, and uses a dedicated peer-to-peer protocol to fetch witnesses and missing bytecode. The authors outline possible uses in higher L1 gas limits, optimistic L2 verification, and native rollups. These are technical claims from a proof of concept, not evidence of production-scale performance; the approach still depends on peer-provided data and accepts a bandwidth cost, and the text anticipates further protocol improvements.
Key ideas
- A stateless node validates blocks using peer-provided state witnesses instead of storing all Ethereum state.
- Ress checks witnesses against the prior state commitment and executes blocks to calculate the new state root.
- The design saves disk space by retaining contract bytecode locally while fetching other required data from peers.
- The document reports successful Holesky testnet validation and gives proof-of-concept performance figures.
- Stateless execution may support scaling L1 gas limits, optimistic L2 verification, and native rollups, with bandwidth tradeoffs.
Tags
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.