Ethereum co—founder Vitalik Buterin spoke about the next stage of the blockchain roadmap - The Purge. It aims to simplify the network structure and reduce the load on nodes.
A quick note on next steps in Ethereum protocol simplification and node resource load decreases (aka \"the Purge\"):https://t.co/BAebCGrisB
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 1, 2024EIP-6780
Central to the development of the protocol at this stage is the implementation and development of EIP-6780, introduced during the recent Dencun hard fork. It optimizes the SELFDESTRUCT opcode, increasing security and simplifying protocol implementation.
"This EIP is a key example of an often underestimated part of Ethereum's development: attempts to simplify the protocol by eliminating complexity and adding new security guarantees," Buterin explained.
EIP-6780 reduces the functionality of the SELFDESTRUCT operating command, which destroys the contract calling it, freeing up space in the data warehouse.
Along with the update, Ethereum has a maximum number of storage slots (approximately: gas limit/5000) that can be edited in one block. This approach greatly simplifies the creation of a protocol client and other types of infrastructure, Buterin believes.
According to him, as part of The Purge, there will be more similar proposals to improve the network.
"Cleaning up" the network
Buterin outlined several more "purges" within Ethereum aimed at optimizing the protocol. Recently, the Geth client deleted thousands of lines of code, abandoning support for networks added before The Merge.
EIP-7523 fixed the problem of "empty accounts". Thanks to the update, support for most empty accounts from Ethereum PoW networks has stopped.
The developer noted that the 18-day window for storing large binary objects in Dencun also contributed to the simplification of the protocol. This approach has limited the amount of stored information to 50 GB, which does not increase over time.
Precompilation
In addition, Buterin suggested using a precompilation mechanism. These are Ethereum contracts, which instead of EVM code contain logic implemented directly by the clients themselves.
"The idea is that precompilation can be used to implement complex forms of cryptography that cannot be effectively applied in EVM. Such solutions are being used very successfully today, in particular, so that applications based on ZK-SNARK can precompile elliptic curves," he explained.
There are other rarely used precompilations:
RIPEMD-160 is a hash function created to ensure better compatibility with the bitcoin network;Identity is a precompilation that produces a result based on the input data;BLAKE2 is a hash function to ensure better compatibility with Zcash;MODEXP is a modular exponentiation with very large numbers to support RSA—based cryptography.However, Buterin stressed that most of these solutions showed a fairly low demand. He allowed the removal of some precompilations in order to optimize transaction processing and consensus mechanism.
EIP-4444
Reducing the amount of storage required to run an Ethereum node can significantly increase the number of people who want to run their own node, the developer believes. The reduced node synchronization time provided by the EIP-4444 also simplifies workflows for many operators.
"Ethereum is permanent, but requiring literally every node to store all data forever is a very "redundant" way to achieve such consistency," Buterin said.
Thanks to EIP-4444, blocks in the network are automatically deleted from the node after a while.
"The key question that needs to be solved is: if the old history is not saved literally in every node, then who keeps it? In fact, this will be done by large-scale organizations such as block reviewers. It is not so difficult to create P2P protocols for storing and transmitting information that are more optimized for this task," Buterin admitted.
The Ethereum co-founder also suggested using peer-to-peer torrent networks to preserve the full history of the blockchain.
New format
At the moment, most of the Ethereum block structure, including transactions and receipts, is still stored in legacy formats based on RLP and Merkle Patricia trees. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to create applications using this information, Buterin stressed.
However, according to him, the Ethereum consensus level has already moved to a cleaner and more efficient SimpleSerialize (SSZ).
The structure of the SSZ format. Data: Vitalik Buterin's blog.The main task in this direction is to transfer the execution level to the same structure, the developer explained.
"In the more distant future, as soon as we learn SNARKing hashes, it is quite possible to replace SHA-256 binary trees and Verkle trees with binary Merkle trees that use a SNARK-compatible hash — one cryptographic data model for the entire blockchain," Buterin summed up.
Recall that in March, the co-founder of Ethereum drew attention to the need for internal scaling of the network and parallelization of roll-up processing to develop the success of the Dencun update.
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