Hey everyone,
One topic I’ve been thinking about lately is stateless blockchains and whether they can realistically address the state bloat issue that’s affecting many L1s. As more contracts are deployed and more users interact with chains, the global state just keeps growing. This creates a burden on full nodes and limits decentralization, since fewer participants can afford to store or sync the full chain.
Stateless blockchains propose a model where validators don’t need to store the entire state — they just verify proofs that are provided with each transaction. That sounds promising on paper, but I wonder how close we really are to making this viable in practice. Ethereum has discussed statelessness for years, but it still seems far off. Are there other chains or research efforts where this is being seriously implemented?
It would be interesting to hear thoughts on the trade-offs involved. How do we handle proof generation costs, latency, and the UX of requiring users or relayers to provide state data? And would statelessness actually improve scalability, or just shift the complexity elsewhere?
If anyone has insights on current efforts or good reading material, I’d appreciate it. Feels like a topic that could become more relevant as networks scale further.