Vitalik Buterin proposed a new type of nodes for preserving privacy in Ethereum

Co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin published a proposal to update the Ethereum development roadmap, which aims to facilitate the launch of local full nodes without sacrificing the scalability of the network.

The initiative has received support from several leading experts in the ecosystem, including Mika Zoltu, Toni Vorstetter, Justin Traglia, and others.

The main goal of the proposed changes is to reduce barriers for users who want to have their own RPC server for private and decentralized access to the Ethereum network.

Therefore, he suggests in the short term:

the full implementation of EIP-4444 — nodes will store history only for the last almost 36 days, which will significantly reduce the amount of disk space;

distributed storage of history — nodes will store fragments of old data using erasure coding for durability;

changing the gas cost structure - making data storage more expensive and execution cheaper to incentivize frugality in state usage.

The medium-term goal is static verification: reducing the need to maintain Merkle branches with full RPC functionality.

In addition, Buterin proposed to introduce a new type of nodes that:

verify blocks without maintaining the full state;

only part of the state defined by the user is preserved;

process local RPC requests within this part;

do not save the branches of the Merkle tree — only the "raw" values.

Thus, users will be able to choose the configuration, for example, all accounts controlled by the private key (EOA) and popular tokens (ERC-20, ERC-721), addresses that have been used in the last two years, as well as exchange apps, DeFi, and privacy.

"Such a node provides local access to important state with maximum privacy," concludes Buterin.

He noted that this approach will allow for the preservation of decentralization, privacy, and openness of the Ethereum network in the future, even with a significant increase in gas limits by 10-100 times.