Ethereum Finds Hope Via Verkle Trees Implementation

Ethereum solo stakers and network nodes stand to gain rewards with the integration of Verkle trees, as stated by Vitalik Buterin. The Ethereum co-founder recently praised the benefits of this technological upgrade to the Ethereum protocol. This followed the much-anticipated activation of the Beacon Chain, marking the transition of Ethereum to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus in September 2022.

Verkle trees are set to enable stateless validator clients, with Buterin emphasizing their ability to empower staking nodes to function with minimal hard disk space and achieve nearly instant synchronization. Buterin had previously outlined a step-by-step process aimed at guiding the smart contract blockchain towards what he termed the endgame of development for Ethereum.

Verkle Trees Part Of Roadmap

Five keywords summarized the successive development phases, The Merge, Surge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge detail the technical complexities of various developmental milestones. Verkle trees fall within the Verge category, representing the third phase of the development path for Ethereum.

This phase includes the introduction of Verkle trees, which are poised to enhance data storage efficiency and reduce node size. Buterin explained the technical details of Verkle trees in the Ethereum Improvement Proposal documentation published in 2022.

Verkle trees serve a similar function to Merkle trees, which consolidate all transactions within a block and generate proof of the entire dataset for a user seeking verification. The key advantage that Verkle trees offer, however, is their significantly smaller proof size. While Verkle trees employ structures similar to Merkle trees, a key difference lies in nodes using a specific hash type called a vector commitment, which is transmitted to sub-nodes. Vector commitments are also expected to provide significant long-term benefits to the Ethereum network.

The Advantages

The primary advantage of Verkle trees is a move towards statelessness for Ethereum, where nodes verifying blocks would no longer be needed for storage. Verkle trees enable smaller proof sizes, which can fit within each block of the Ethereum blockchain. As a result, nodes can verify any block using the contained data.

The implementation of Verkle trees is expected to introduce a variety of new functionalities, including reduced hardware requirements for operating Ethereum nodes, thus improving network decentralization. Additionally, new nodes can quickly join the network and synchronize with it promptly.

The development of Verkle trees is ongoing, and integrating them into the Ethereum protocol will require several adjustments. These adjustments include a new data structure to maintain the state of the network, a revised gas accounting model, a plan for migrating to Verkle trees, new cryptographic primitives, and new block-level fields.