Vitalik Buterin on fix for Ethereum centralization — make running nodes easier

The centralization of nodes is 1 of the biggest problems facing the Ethereum web and should beryllium addressed by making the moving of nodes cheaper and easier, according to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

At current, the bulk of the 5,901 progressive Ethereum nodes are being tally done centralized web providers similar Amazon Web Services (AWS), which galore experts assertion leaves the Ethereum blockchain exposed to a centralized constituent of failure.

Distribution of Ethereum nodes from web work providers. Source: Ethernodes

Speaking astatine Korea Blockchain Week, Buterin outlined six cardinal problems that request addressing to lick centralization but highlighted that the node contented was a “big portion of the puzzle” to guarantee the Ethereum web remains decentralized successful the agelong run.

“One of those six things is making it technically easier for radical to tally nodes and statelessness is 1 of the truly important technologies successful doing that right,” helium explained.

“Today, it takes hundreds of gigabytes of information to tally a node. With stateless clients, you tin tally a node connected fundamentally zero.”

The conception of statelessness refers to removing the reliance connected centralized work providers to verify enactment connected the network. According to the Ethereum foundation, existent decentralization is not imaginable until node operators tin tally Ethereum connected “modest” and inexpensive hardware.

As Buterin noted, statelessness forms a cardinal constituent of the Ethereum roadmap, with large steps towards statelessness being made successful “The Verge” and “The Purge” stages:

“In the longer word there’s a program to support afloat verified Ethereum nodes wherever you could virtually it connected your phone.”

Updated roadmap diagram! pic.twitter.com/MT9BKgYcJH

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 4, 2022

Despite statelessness forming a halfway portion of the Ethereum roadmap, Buterin admitted that these highly-technical concerns were improbable to beryllium addressed immoderate clip successful the contiguous future.

“These method problems volition person to beryllium addressed yet — possibly a 10-year timescale, possibly a 20-year timescale,” helium said.

Related: Ethereum staking services hold to 22% bounds of each validators

Outside of statelessness, Buterin said the next-most important moves towards decreasing Ethereum centralization included, making documentation easier, lowering barriers to distributed staking, ensuring staking was much unafraid and much broadly; making it much convenient to involvement Ether (ETH) successful general.

Ultimately however, Buterin concluded that the astir time-sensitive and pressing interest for Ethereum arsenic full was achieving higher levels of scalability.

At present, Ethereum scaling protocols dominate the usage of zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups.

ZK-rollups person been lauded by galore wrong the Ethereum assemblage arsenic a cardinal instrumentality to achieving scalability, arsenic ZK rollups enactment to amended throughput connected the main Ethereum concatenation by moving computation and state-storage disconnected chain.

Magazine: Here’s however Ethereum’s ZK-rollups tin go interoperable