Vitalik Buterin – Making Full Nodes Easier: New L1 Roadmap Prioritizes Local RPC, Privacy, and Lower Storage Needs

The excerpt discusses adjustments to the L1 scaling roadmap to make it easier for users to run full nodes, emphasizing the importance of local RPC servers for trustless, censorship-resistant, and privacy-friendly access to the blockchain. While ZK-EVMs and PIR offer privacy and trustlessness, they may not fully replace the value of self-hosted nodes due to high costs, metadata privacy concerns, and censorship risks from centralized RPC providers.

Key short-term priorities include:

• Fully implementing EIP-4444 to reduce disk space requirements.
• Developing a distributed history storage solution using erasure coding.
• Adjusting gas pricing to make storage more expensive and execution cheaper.

A medium-term goal is stateless verification, which would reduce storage needs further. The proposed partially stateless node allows users to run a node that stores only a subset of the state, enabling local RPC access to the data they care about while reducing storage requirements. Users can configure what state is stored, offering flexibility and privacy.