Vitalik Sounds Alarm on RPC Vulnerabilities—Pushes ’Partially Stateless’ Ethereum Fix

Ethereum’s co-founder drops a blockchain bombshell: Remote Procedure Call (RPC) endpoints are the network’s Achilles’ heel. His solution? A radical shift toward partially stateless nodes that could reshape how the chain operates.

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The RPC reckoning

Buterin’s warning exposes a dirty little secret—most dApps and wallets rely on centralized RPC providers like Infura, creating single points of failure. ’It’s like rebuilding the banking system but keeping all the SWIFT servers in one basement,’ quipped one developer (who clearly missed the 2022 crypto credit crunch).

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Stateless salvation?

The proposed fix would let nodes verify blocks without storing full state data—a middle ground between today’s resource-heavy nodes and theoretical ’fully stateless’ clients. Early tests show 60% storage cuts, but skeptics note it’s another complex layer for a chain already groaning under scaling pressures.

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While the crypto crowd debates technical merits, TradFi veterans chuckle into their triple-shot lattes—’They’ll decentralize everything except the actual infrastructure.’ Ethereum’s next hard fork just got spicy.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled an ambitious new proposal that promises to turbocharge Ethereum’s scalability and privacy while preserving decentralization.

 In a detailed blog post on May 19, Buterin introduced the concept of– a breakthrough approach designed to make running ethereum nodes easier, more efficient, and censorship-resistant.

Here’s what you need to know.

The Hidden Danger of RPC Centralization

There is a growing risk in the Ethereum ecosystem: the increasing dominance of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) providers. These services allow wallets, users, and decentralized apps to interact with Ethereum without running their own full nodes, but there’s a catch.

“A market structure dominated by a few RPC providers will face strong pressure to deplatform or censor users,” Buterin warned.

Some providers already exclude entire countries, creating a dangerous concentration of power that threatens Ethereum’s foundational principles of openness and trustlessness.

What Are Partially Stateless Nodes – And Why They Matter

Buterin’s solution?– a novel node design that validates blocks “statelessly.” Unlike traditional full nodes that require storing the entire blockchain history and all Merkle proofs, these nodes selectively keep only relevant data subsets.

This means users can configure their nodes to store data tied to their own accounts, frequently used decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, and popular tokens like Ether and stablecoins. Queries outside this stored subset either fail or are routed through RPC providers, dramatically reducing storage needs and bandwidth without sacrificing security.

Balancing Efficiency, Privacy, and Trust

As Ethereum scales and gas limits rise, running a full node becomes increasingly resource-intensive. Partially stateless nodes aim to ease this burden, enabling more users to run nodes locally and maintainto blockchain data.

Beyond reducing resource demands, this design addresses metadata privacy concerns, helping users avoid exposing their full transaction activity. 

The approach aligns with ongoing Ethereum Improvement Proposals like EIP-4444, which focuses on decentralized history storage, and reflects Buterin’s broader push to keep Ethereum’s infrastructure robust and user-friendly.