Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has introduced a refined vision for Ethereum’s scaling strategy—one that balances aggressive L1 gas limit increases with the need to maintain decentralization and self-sovereignty for individual node operators
His latest post, titled “A local-node-favoring delta to the scaling roadmap,” outlines a set of technical adjustments designed to ensure users can still run useful, privacy-preserving local nodes even as the network scales up.
Beyond Chain Validation: Why Local Nodes Still Matter
Historically, the role of a full node was primarily associated with validating the chain and ensuring trustlessness. With the rise of ZK-EVMs, many believed this function could be offloaded, minimizing the need for individuals to run full nodes. However, Buterin emphasizes a second critical use case: enabling local, trustless, and censorship-resistant access to ETH data through personal RPC endpoints.
While zero-knowledge proofs and private information retrieval (PIR) protocols can address verification and privacy concerns when using third-party RPC services, Buterin points out key limitations: cost inefficiencies of fully cryptographic approaches, metadata privacy leaks, and centralization risks among RPC providers. These vulnerabilities underscore the continued value of running personal nodes.
A New Node Paradigm: “Partially Stateless Nodes”
At the heart of Buterin’s proposal is a new kind of node configuration: the partially stateless node. These nodes verify the blockchain statelessly, using methods like ZK-EVM or classic validation, but maintain a configurable subset of the Ethereum state. This approach allows them to fulfill RPC queries for relevant data locally, preserving privacy and autonomy without requiring the massive storage footprint of a traditional full node.
Users can configure which parts of the state to store based on their needs—such as frequently used wallets, specific ERC-20/721 tokens, or smart contracts relevant to DeFi and privacy tools. This flexibility gives users complete control over their local access and data footprint.
Short- and Medium-Term Priorities
To support this vision, Buterin recommends immediate acceleration of several roadmap items:
- EIP-4444: Full rollout to reduce node storage by limiting history to ~36 days.
- Distributed history storage: Ensures long-term data availability through decentralized redundancy.
- Gas pricing reforms: Make it more expensive to create new state while reducing execution costs, addressing long-term state growth concerns.
In the medium term, the rollout of stateless verification will allow nodes to operate with even less storage by removing the need to hold Merkle branches.
Local Autonomy in a Scaled Ethereum
Buterin’s adjusted roadmap reveals a strong preference for preserving local node usability in the face of L1 scaling. His proposals offer a compromise: Ethereum can grow 10–100x in block capacity without forcing users into centralized data dependencies or compromising on trustlessness and privacy.
The partially stateless node, if widely adopted, could become a cornerstone of this balance—empowering users with high-efficiency, low-footprint tools to remain sovereign participants in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Kosta Gushterov
Reporter at Coindoo
Kosta has been a part of the team since 2021 and has solidified his position with a thirst for knowledge, incredible dedication to his work and a “detective-like” mindset. He not only covers a wide range of trending topics, he also creates reviews, PR articles and educational content. His work has also been referenced by other news outlets.
Source: https://coindoo.com/vitalik-buterin-proposes-new-node-type-for-scalable-ethereum/