At the Ethereum ACDC meeting this week, the issue of the rapid growth of historical data was re-discussed after the Cancun upgrade. Although the growth rate has declined due to the upgrade, it is still too fast. Therefore, developers have reached a consensus that EIP- 4444 importance and scheduling moving forward. Members of the Ethereum Foundation summarized the meeting contents and summarized the chain news.
This article is compiled and compiled by Lianxin. If you have any questions, please refer to the original text.
Background knowledge: introduction to status and historical data
definition
According to Paradigm’s research, which provides participants with basic concepts, state and historical data are two different conceptual data sets:
The state is a set of information required to create and verify new Ethereum blocks. The state consists of contract bytecode, contract storage, account balance and account random number.
Historical data is the set of data required to synchronize nodes from the genesis block to the latest block. Historical data consists of blocks and transactions.
Why status and historical data grow
Status and historical data bring three aspects of pressure to the node’s hardware:
Status growth: the accumulation of new accounts, new contract bytecodes, and new contract storage data.
Historical data growth: the accumulation of new blocks and new transactions.
State access: related read and write operations when constructing and verifying blocks.
Every time Ethereum executes a transaction, all resources used by that transaction are priced in gas fees. Ethereum’s gas fee limit therefore limits all forms of on-chain activity, which in turn affects block size and the number of operations per block.
Next, the more bytes there are per block, the faster the history grows. On the other hand, the more operations per block, the greater the state access rate, and generally the greater the state growth rate.
State and history data problem structure map (source) How the growth of state and history data will affect nodes
These pressures have led to an increasing hardware burden on nodes. Specifically, there are the following four points:
Network Reading: The amount of upload and download speed that a node must maintain in order to reach a stable consensus with the network.
Storage size: is the amount of data that a node must keep in permanent storage in order to construct, verify, and distribute blocks.
Memory size: is the amount of cache data a node must keep in memory in order to stay up to date with the latest blocks.
Storage reads: This is the amount of read and write operations a node must perform per second to stay synchronized with the latest block.
Recommended reading: Why is state inflation the ultimate bottleneck in the development of blockchain expansion technology? Reason for recommendation: Reading this article can help you understand the difference between the status and the historical data of the ledger, and know that there is currently no good way to compress the status. If the status expansion is left alone, it may cause the network to collapse for a long time and cannot be repaired.
Historical data has expired and returned!
In this meeting, the issue of the growth of historical data was mentioned again.
Cross-chain bridges are the main reason for the growth of historical data
At this ACDC meeting, developers @notnotstorm and @gakonst analyzed the growth of Ethereum status data and historical data. They said that the development speed of historical data is much faster than the development speed of status, which is mainly caused by various cross-border data. Caused by chain bridge.
Historical data growth source proportion change chart (data source)
It is expected that historical data will seriously affect the overall storage structure of Ethereum, resulting in an increase in the hardware burden of nodes.
Cancun upgrade slows growth
The Cancun upgrade (Dencun) provides a little help in slowing down the growth of historical data. The historical data growth across chain bridges has been reduced by approximately 50%, which is approximately 33% of the overall growth.
After the Cancun upgrade, the growth rate of Ethereum’s historical data decreased by 30%
(What impact will the Cancun upgrade have on users? Focused summary of Ramble Bar, an offline gathering of Lian News)
However, the growth rate of Ethereum’s historical data is still about 10 times the state growth rate.
EIP-4444 is gaining importance
Therefore, in this meeting, most developers agreed that they should continue to study EIP-4444 and import historical data into the expired function. The ideal goal is to stop providing pre-merger history on the Ethereum p2p layer within the next year or so.
EIP-4444 implementation requires additional means of downloading history and standardizing storage formats, work on both of which is already under development.
Recommended reading: Ethereum releases 2024 roadmap, continuing to move forward in the direction of the world settlement layer Recommended reason: The article mentioned the positioning of EIP-4444 in the Ethereum roadmap. Originally, the developers believed that other methods could be used to slow down historical data Due to growth issues, EIP-4444 was postponed. After the Cancun upgrade is completed, historical data expiration will be an important task with higher priority.
This article EIP-4444 historical data expiration proposal has become one of the major goals of Ethereum developers next year. It first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.
