POSSIBLE FUTURES OF THE ETHEREUM PROTOCOL, PART 5: THE PURGE

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

Ethereum's “Purge” initiative aims to address the challenge of blockchain bloat, with proposals focusing on history expiry, state expiry, and feature cleanup. Full nodes currently require 1.1 terabytes for execution data and several hundred gigabytes for consensus data. Key solutions include EIP-4444, which aims to limit historical data storage to one year, and transitioning to a distributed storage model. More complex expiry proposals require address format changes. There are significant technical challenges around backwards compatibility and maintaining Ethereum's permanence guarantees.