As of today, all Ethereum execution clients support history pruning for pre-merge data. For mainnet, this means 300-500 GB less disk space required to operate a node. Learn more about what this means and how to take advantage the new functionality: <insert link> If you're a full node operator or a validator, this change will not affect you beyond the space savings as history is not needed to validate the head of the chain. Archive node users and application developers who need the history to generate their custom indexes will need to begin migrating to external history providers as the history will become less available over the p2p with time. A list of providers can be found here: https://eth-clients.github.io/history-endpoints/ This is the first step towards full, rolling history expiry as defined in EIP-4444. Please see the EIP to learn more about the motivation for history expiry and the longer term plan history expiry: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4444
7/7/2025As of today, all Ethereum execution clients support partial history expiry in accordance with EIP-4444. While work on full, rolling history expiry is ongoing, users can expect to reduce the disk space required for an Ethereum node by 300-500 GB by removing the block data prior to the merge. This will allow a node to fit comfortably on a 2 TB disk. See below for information on each specific client. Chain history By definition a blockchain is a chain of blocks starting at a specific genesis point. For Ethereum, that occurred on July 30, 2015. Each block includes information about the protocol itself, i.e. the current gas limit, a list of user transactions, and the result of those transactions encapsulated by a receipt. This data has many uses: Full validation of the chain requires executing every historical block to ensure that, not only is the current head state correct, but all historical states from genesis to today were correct. Constructing indexes over the chain history, e.g. tracking the balance changes of a certain account over time or how the state of a certain application changes. For L2s that have posted transactions using calldata, they would need the chain history to fully validate their chain or construct indexes. General proof-of-past operations such as proving a certain transaction was sent at some point. In rare cases, non-fungible token (NFT) data. But the prevailing method of hosting NFTs on-chain is to store the NFT data either in contract storage or reference external sources, such as IPFS.
7/7/2025The go-ethereum team has prepared a set of preferences for the next Ethereum fork, Osaka. Osaka and the future The Prague hardfork was unfocused and undisciplined with respect to scope. After the headlining features, PeerDAS and EOF, were dropped, the fork continued to grow with little to show. For Osaka we prefer a clear and restrained scope. If we maintain this, it is likely that the fork will be ready for mainnet later this year. If we undertake many additional projects for Osaka and beyond, it's likely we again slip into 2026. Beyond Osaka, we believe there are two main themes the execution layer should be working towards. stateless -- this is the next important Execution Layer frontier. It supports many of our long term goals in Ethereum: scalability, accessibility, and reliability.
4/9/2025Here's an assortment of ideas Sam, Ansgar and I have had rumbling around for some time. EOA 2.0 A nice place to start would be an invoker that just improves the status quo for EOA users. It should add only the most basic functionality: self-relayed each authorization only valid once multiple ops in a single tx
4/14/2024