a16z Crypto Reveals Intractable Issues in Stateless Blockchains Viability

Key Points:

• a16z Crypto’s research paper delves into the challenges of stateless blockchains, a hot topic in the crypto world.
• Despite much anticipation, the paper presents compelling evidence that the gap between theory and practice in this area is insurmountable.
• The article sheds light on the storage dilemma plaguing blockchains. Bitcoin nodes currently store 7 GB and Ethereum nodes a staggering 650 GB of data.

a16z crypto has unveiled a thought-provoking research paper on its official website today.

Titled “On the impossibility of stateless blockchains” the paper delves into a fundamental challenge that has been gripping the blockchain space. Despite considerable efforts in the realm of stateless blockchains, a16z crypto’s research suggests a persistent impracticality in achieving this concept, highlighting an irrevocable chasm between theoretical promise and tangible application.

The research underscores a critical conundrum faced by the blockchain community, positing that even the most ingenious solutions are incapable of surmounting this hurdle. Stateless blockchains, which aim to enhance scalability and efficiency by removing the necessity for nodes to store the entire transaction history, have garnered substantial attention in recent times. However, a16z crypto’s paper casts a shadow on these aspirations, illuminating the unbridgeable divide between the conceptual elegance of stateless designs and their operational feasibility.

The article underscores this predicament with empirical evidence. Notably, it highlights that current blockchain implementations entail a storage burden that scales linearly with on-chain throughput, or transactions per second (TPS). As TPS increases to support the demands of real-world applications, the storage demands on nodes have grown to exorbitant levels. For instance, Bitcoin nodes currently store around 7 GB of data, while Ethereum nodes grapple with a staggering 650 GB. However, the paper elucidates that achieving the TPS levels required for mainstream adoption, ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands, would result in an insurmountable storage requirement — reaching the realm of terabytes or even petabytes.

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