Active Projects
An overview of the projects currently being worked on by the Stateless Consensus team and the broader community.
01
Protocol Changes
Core EIPs that change how Ethereum handles state at the protocol level — from tree migration to gas repricing.
Binary Tree Implementation
Migration of Ethereum's state tree from the Merkle Patricia Trie to a binary hash tree. The binary tree produces significantly smaller state proofs, compatible with STARK compression. Implementation is underway in Geth and Besu.
EIP-8037: State Creation Gas Cost Increase
Harmonizes and increases the cost of state creation operations to mitigate state growth under higher block gas limits. Introduces a dynamic cost-per-byte variable that scales with the gas limit.
EIP-8038: State-Access Gas Cost Update
Increases the gas cost of state-access operations to reflect Ethereum's larger state and the resulting slowdown. Also fixes underpriced EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY operations.
EIP-7907: Code Size Limits
Study of the impact of increasing the maximum contract code size, coupled with gas adjustments. Benchmarks measure the effect on client performance to guide the ACD decision.
02
State Management
Research and proposals for expiring, compressing, and repricing state to keep the active dataset manageable.
Compression-based State Expiry
An approach to state expiry through compression: old data is moved out of the active database into flat files, replaced by pointers. Corresponding trie nodes are removed to improve I/O.
State Expiry Research
Exploration of complementary expiry models: leaf-based (EIP-7736 style), epoch-based with resurrection bitmaps, and a model keeping only one year of active state in memory.
Temporary Contract Storage
Semi-persistent storage managed by a system contract that clears automatically on a fixed cadence. Aims to move ephemeral data out of permanent storage to slow state growth.
Activeness-Based State Access Repricing
Temporal locality pricing for state access: staler state costs more gas, frequently accessed state costs less. Creates economic incentives for state hygiene without mandating deletion.
03
Performance & Tooling
Benchmarking infrastructure and metrics that measure the real-world impact of state growth on client performance.
BloatNet
A dedicated test network for stress-testing Ethereum's performance under state growth. Identified critical thresholds for memory consumption and validator performance degradation.
Cross-Client Execution Metrics
A specification for standardized execution metrics across Ethereum clients. Enables objective performance comparison and bottleneck identification for L1 scaling.
04
Storage Optimization
Techniques for more efficient on-chain storage layouts that reduce witness sizes and improve locality.
User-Associated Storage (UAS)
Associates contract storage directly with user accounts, namespaced by contract address. Estimated savings of ~2000 gas per transaction. Compatible with state expiry.
ERC-8147: Locality-Preserving Storage Layout
A compiler-level change so that mapping storage keys for the same address land on the same leaf page in the binary trie. Improves spatial locality and reduces witness sizes.
Partial Statefulness (Selective Snap Sync)
The ability for a node to sync only a segment of the state rather than the full state. Formalized through the OOPSIE concept.