Lot of users are expecting to see Ethereum launch faster. They are already tired of status quo that keeps waiting for hours and days to get sync. They feel it is unacceptable. So, one of the developer teams on the Ethereum Network “The Trinity Team” have developed Beam Sync.
When it comes to setting up a new node up and synced, the slowest part is the state download and they are looking to solve it. Beam Sync makes this possible by jumping to the latest block and downloading only the “state” which is required to verify that one block. Therefore, the download will be fast enough to stay at/near the tip of the chain.
Those who are interested in getting to understand, Beam Sync in 80 Seconds using Meta-Witnesses should read the publication by Jason Caver. A YouTube video is also available in this regard, making available a live recorded demo.
Lot of other improvements to help better user experience are happening on the Ethereum network with contributions coming from different developer teams.
There are intermittent workshops happening about how to set up a validator to help keep Ethereum decentralized for years to come.
A lot of development and ton of attention seems to be needed per Twitter Handle, Lakshman Shankar:
What’s the problem? The Ethereum ‘state’ consists of all of the data necessary to process a new transaction. You can think of it as the application state of all smart contracts and all account balances each node needs to store this data to verify the chain.
As NFTs and DeFi explode, the size of this data is growing at an increasingly rapid pace: If this continues, it’ll become unfeasible for most to participate in verifying the network. This isn’t the decentralized future we want!
The key insight that motivates solutions to the problem is that Ethereum doesn’t charge users of its storage ‘rent’. It only charges them once.
Also, storage on Ethereum today costs (via gas) one STORE instruction in the evm. this is economically broken. It costs nodes an infinite amount to store (assuming Ethereum lasts forever), but the user only pays once.
There is currently a two-pronged approach to addressing the state problem: 1. State expiry 2. Weak statelessness.
State expiry is the classic database cache approach socialized if a piece of state hasn’t been touched for some amount of time, nodes don’t have to store it anymore. If a user wants to access an old piece of state, he/she must provide a ‘witness’ or proof that the state is valid.
And, there is a long thread which explains further facts related to this discussion which those who are interested might want to follow.
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