Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, expressed his anticipation for Verkle Trees in a tweet today. The goal is to launch Verkle Trees on the Ethereum mainnet this year. Verkle Trees is a new data structure used in blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, aimed at improving data storage and indexing efficiency.
Verkle Trees, an evolution of the well-known Merkle Trees in the crypto community, utilizes vector commitments and other mathematical techniques to make data storage more compact while maintaining data verifiability.
Imagine blockchain as a massive ledger that records all transactions and operations. Whenever there is a new transaction, it needs to be recorded in this ledger. Typically, to verify these records, you need to have a copy of the entire ledger, which requires significant storage space and processing power.
With the new Verkle Trees technology, Ethereum can achieve “stateless verification.” This means that even if you don’t have a copy of the entire ledger, you can still verify the correctness of transactions. You only need a small file, which is like a summary of a page in the ledger. It contains all the necessary information to confirm the correctness of a specific transaction.
There are many benefits to this approach, such as saving a lot of storage space and making the entire blockchain network more efficient. At the same time, to make this method feasible, Ethereum has proposed a new rule: charging based on the amount of resources you use. For example, the more pages you read from the ledger, the higher the fee you need to pay.
According to official documents, the goal is to launch Verkle Trees on the Ethereum mainnet this year, but the specific timing has not been announced. Vitalik also stated that after the launch, it will be a significant improvement for users who stake individually and beneficial for user-facing lightweight clients.
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