Vitalik Buterin Reveals Next Stages of Ethereum’s Purge Initiative

• The Purge simplifies the network by removing unnecessary and outdated data.
• It will implement EIP-4444 history expiry to limit how much data may be kept.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has announced the next stages in the Purge initiative to simplify the protocol and reduce the demand on nodes’ resources. The Purge is an important part of Ethereum’s transition since it simplifies the network by removing unnecessary and outdated data.

In addition to lowering the storage needs for historical data, this step also drastically reduces the technical debt of the Ethereum protocol and the hard drive requirements for node operators.

Reducing Complexity and Providing Additional Security

However, as pointed out by Buterin, the protocol was made simpler by reducing complexity and providing additional security guarantees with the introduction of Ethereum improvement proposal (EIP)-6780 during the Dencun hard fork, which removed most of the “SELFDESTRUCT” code functions.

Following the execution of EIP-6780, each Ethereum block will have more storage spaces, according to Buterin, since certain SELFDESTRUCT functions will be cleared. Buterin is holding out hope that a future EIP will do away with the SELFDESTRUCT code altogether.

The Purge will implement EIP-4444 history expiry to limit how much data may be kept in the past. Thus, nodes will be able to choose whether or not to remove blocks from the history that are younger than one year.

Unless otherwise requested, the historical data will only be needed when a peer needs to synchronize with the chain head. Therefore, a fully synchronized node does not need history data older than one year when new blocks are verified.

According to Buterin, EIP-4444 has the potential to significantly boost the decentralization of Ethereum’s nodes. Along with the announcement that Geth has removed support for pre-Merge (PoW) networks, the Ethereum co-founder revealed that thousands of lines of code have been purged.

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