Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Proposes New Plan to Balance L1 Scaling and Node Usability, Strengthening Decentralization and User Privacy
(Background: Analysis firm Bernstein examines Ethereum’s surge: The lucky beneficiaries of stablecoins, L2, and airdrop recovery)
(Context: Ethereum announces the launch of the “One Trillion Dollar Security Plan,” pledging to be the cornerstone of digital civilization)
On May 19, 2025, Vitalik Buterin proposed a new direction for scaling to address the challenges of Layer 1 scaling, particularly the increasing difficulty of running full nodes. The essence of this proposal is to balance the enhancement of transaction capacity with the usability of personal nodes, thereby strengthening user privacy and resistance to censorship.
The Dilemma of Ethereum’s L1 Scaling and Node Centralization Risks
Layer 1 scaling through increasing gas limits leads to a dramatic rise in the hardware, storage, and network speed requirements for full nodes, raising participation thresholds and threatening network decentralization. Users become more reliant on centralized RPC service providers, which impacts data autonomy. Existing privacy solutions, such as ZK-EVM and PIR, still face limitations in costs and metadata leakage. Lowering the threshold for personal nodes is crucial for maintaining decentralization.
Moving Towards Lightweight Nodes
Vitalik emphasized that a key short-term objective is to advance EIP-4444, which would allow nodes to retain only about 36 days of recent data, significantly reducing hard drive requirements and establishing a distributed historical data storage solution. Adjusting gas pricing to increase storage costs and reduce execution costs would also encourage efficient data usage. The mid-term goal is to achieve stateless verification, further simplifying the operation of RPC nodes.
Innovative Concept: Partial Stateless Nodes
Vitalik further proposed the concept of “Partial Stateless Nodes” to address scenarios where the L1 gas limit is significantly increased in the future. The core idea is that nodes do not need to store the complete state Merkle branches but only a user-configured subset of the state. Nodes can still verify the validity of the entire chain (through stateless verification or ZK-EVM) while maintaining a part of the latest state, directly responding to local RPC requests and providing trustless access to private data. Requests that exceed the configured scope may fail or be rolled back.
Users can flexibly configure the subset of states to be stored, such as excluding junk contracts, including EOA/SCW and commonly used token states, and even managing through on-chain contracts to retain only the original values. Specific designs, such as Validity-Only Partial Statelessness (VOPS), require only about 8.4 GB of minimal state data, which can lower hardware thresholds and enhance scalability.
Profound Implications for Ethereum?
The “Partial Stateless Nodes” proposed by Vitalik are expected to significantly lower operational thresholds, enabling more individuals to run nodes, thus reinforcing decentralization and enhancing user privacy and resistance to censorship (data is accessed locally, free from surveillance filtering).
This will also optimize the development environment for L2 and dApps, with related upgrades such as the Pectra hard fork also in progress. In the long run, discussions regarding Account Abstraction VOPS (AA-VOPS) and the potential replacement of EVM with RISC-V represent a roadmap for Ethereum that balances decentralization and scalability.
Further Reading: Technology
What is RISC-V, which Vitalik advocates? Why did CKB-VM choose RISC-V?
Vitalik’s proposals, including EIP-4444, stateless verification, and “Partial Stateless Nodes,” demonstrate his commitment to balancing scalability and decentralization in Ethereum. It is evident that after announcing a return to the spirit of cryptopunk, he is promoting ways for more users to lower the cost of running personal nodes while safely and privately participating in the network.
