Blockchain's Storage Burden Grows Unmanageable

The perpetual storage model used by early blockchains is facing a contradiction as it grows in adoption. The model requires every validator node to retain the entire state, including balances, nonces, and contract storage, without any expiration mechanism. This creates an asymptotic burden on operators, making independent verification a privilege of infrastructure.

The problem lies in separating two components: transaction history and state. While transaction history can be pruned or archived without affecting validation, the state must reside on SSD drives and in RAM for low-latency random access. The inertial expansion of the state is a direct consequence of data permanence, leading to hardware costs that grow monotonically.

Ethereum's experience illustrates this trend: its state has grown from a few gigabytes in 2016 to several hundred gigabytes today. This growth raises synchronization times and reduces the number of actors capable of operating a full validation node.