Why This Matters Growing gas limits drive faster state growth, making the database layer a critical bottleneck. At 60M gas: ~124 GiB/year state growth; at 100M gas: ~197 GiB/year. Consequences include longer sync times, degraded access latency, and higher hardware requirements for node operators. Current Client DBs Client DB Engine Approach Roadmap Geth
1/30/2026Motivation The client ecosystem is different to how it was a few years ago. Today operators can choose between multiple high-quality clients, with new ones joining the ranks. Practical information about the clients exists but it is scattered across repos, websites, X threads and tribal memory. This makes it difficult for operators to make informed and use-case dependent decisions. Abstract We propose a dashboard which serves factual objective information about clients and surfaces the trade-offs that node operators care about, to help with the decision fatigue. Goals Help node operators choose the right client for their use-case
1/5/2026by jsvisaSeptember 2 2025 You can find the full report here: https://hackmd.io/@jsvisa/geth-pebble-grant-report Running a full Ethereum node has always appealed to me because it embodies the spirit of decentralization — you verify everything yourself and help secure the network. Go-Ethereum (Geth) is the most widely used execution client, so its performance determines how viable it is for everyday node runners, researchers, and infrastructure providers. This is my story as an external contributor funded by an Ethereum Foundation grant to work on PebbleDB performance, state size analysis, and code improvements. It was a rare chance to peek under the hood of Geth, experiment at massive scale, and push forward the limits of what the client can do. Why Benchmark and Analyse Geth? The grant’s aim was simple: measure where Geth struggles with very large databases and fix it. Over time the Ethereum state has ballooned as more contracts, tokens and users join the network. By the start of 2025 the database was hundreds of gigabytes and projected to keep growing at ~48 GiB per year. Rather than rely on gut feelings, I wanted concrete data, so the project was split into four phases:
9/3/2025Invitees: ELs (incl. ethrex) CLs Etherscan Infura Alchemy Ankr Tenderly Quicknode
8/28/2025