Vitalik Buterin Pushes Ethereum Node History Limit—Here’s Why It Matters for Decentralization

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin doubles down on node history pruning—a move that could let everyday users run personal nodes without crippling hardware demands.

The decentralization play:
By capping historical data storage, Ethereum aims to sidestep the ’node elitism’ plaguing other chains. No more enterprise-grade rigs required.

The fine print:
Critics whisper about trade-offs—light clients might rely more on centralized infra. But hey, at least it’s not another ’institutional-grade’ solution that somehow always involves Wall Street middlemen.

Buterin proposed solutions for Ethereum nodes

To ease node operation, Buterin suggested prioritizing Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4444 (EIP-4444). This would limit the amount of historical data a node needs to store to 36 days.

Meanwhile, he recommended a distributed storage solution that fragments and spreads history across the network using erasure coding to ensure older blockchain data remains available.

According to him:

“This ensures the property that ‘a blockchain is forever’ without depending on centralized providers or putting heavy burdens on node operators.”

Buterin further proposed revisiting Ethereum’s gas pricing model. He believes increasing the gas cost for state creation, such as new storage slots, deploying contracts, and sending ETH to inactive accounts, WOULD discourage excessive data storage.

At the same time, reducing execution costs could help ease the burden on the network.

Partially Stateless nodes

Meanwhile, a key highlight of Buterin’s proposal is the introduction of “partially stateless nodes.”

According to him, these nodes would not store the complete Ethereum state but only a subset relevant to the user’s needs.

The Ethereum co-founder added that these nodes would still verify blocks and respond to data requests, but only for the portion of the state they manage. He wrote:

“The node is capable of responding to RPC requests as long as the required data is within that subset of the state; other requests will fail.”

For other data, Buterin said node operators could use cryptographic tools or external services to preserve privacy and choice.