Vitalik proposes a new direction for Ethereum expansion: leaning towards local nodes, balancing performance and decentralization

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently proposed in his latest research post that a "local-first clients" strategy should be introduced in the Ethereum expansion roadmap to improve blockchain performance while alleviating the impact of high Gas limits on personal full node operations.

Vitalik emphasized that the core value of personal nodes is not limited to on-chain transaction verification, but also to provide local RPC access to meet users' needs for privacy, data sovereignty and anti-censorship. He pointed out that as the Ethereum network continues to expand, increasing the Gas limit can increase throughput, but it also causes the cost of running full nodes to continue to rise, which is not conducive to the long-term development of decentralization.

To this end, he made the following key suggestions:

• Accelerate the full deployment of EIP-4444: The proposal advocates that light nodes do not need to store historical data for more than one year for a long time, which helps reduce node storage pressure.
• Build a decentralized historical data storage network: Archive historical blocks through a distributed solution to reduce the burden on full nodes while ensuring data availability.
• Adjust the Gas mechanism: Increase the cost of new state storage to encourage developers to optimize contract design and avoid redundant state expansion.
• Introducing the "partially stateless node" model: nodes only maintain key state data on demand, taking into account both operational efficiency and local privacy protection.

Industry observers pointed out that Vitalik's proposals are intended to reshape the Ethereum client architecture, enhancing the operational feasibility and control of individual users without sacrificing network scalability. This also means that the future of Ethereum may be more "user-centric" and support a variety of client operation methods.

This research provides new ideas for the Ethereum expansion roadmap and may also affect the priority ranking of subsequent protocol upgrades. The community is currently conducting extensive discussions on related proposals.