Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a scaling roadmap for the network covering the next five years. The main challenge is data storage. While ZK-EVM already offers a solution for transaction processing by boosting performance, no silver bullet exists for storing balances and contract codes.
The Main Barrier to Growth
Today, the Ethereum data ledger grows by 100 GB annually. If throughput increases 20-fold, this figure will jump to 2 TB per year, and within just four years, the database volume will reach 8 TB.
Storing such volume on a disk is simple, but synchronizing it is difficult. This threatens decentralization: regular home stakers simply won’t be able to maintain an up-to-date version of the blockchain, leaving the network in the hands of professional data centers.
Data Segregation: Pay or Rewrite
Buterin suggests ending the situation where every byte in the blockchain costs the same. The solution involves a rigid division of memory into two classes.
The first class is elite and permanent. This is the Ethereum state we are used to. It will remain convenient but become an expensive luxury. Complex DeFi protocols, which critically need to interact with each other instantly and have constant access to data, will continue to operate in this zone.
The second class is cheap and temporary. This is a special zone for mass operations like simple token transfers or NFTs. Storage here will cost pennies but comes with restrictions: data either “burns” after a month or operates on a UTXO model, similar to Bitcoin, disappearing from active memory immediately after being spent.
This is an ultimatum for the industry: if you want cheap transactions for users, rewrite your application architecture from scratch to meet new standards.
What If I Go Into a Cave?
A valid question arose in the comments to the post: what happens to a user’s assets if they disappear for a couple of years and miss the deadlines for updating temporary data? Will their NFTs or tokens burn?
Buterin offered reassurance: assets will be recoverable using cryptographic proofs, but the responsibility for this mechanism will fall on the shoulders of wallet and application developers, not the protocol itself.
“I expect that anyone building serious applications will in any case be forced to handle the ‘user went into a cave for two years and came back’ scenario, so one might as well build the architecture with this in mind right away,” Vitalik summarized.
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