Buterin Seeks Scalability Lessons in Bitcoin's Utreexo
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has expressed interest in exploring lessons from Bitcoin's Utreexo technology to scale Ethereum. In a recent comment, Buterin praised the work of Bitcoin developers on UTXO-based architecture and Utreexo, which allows Bitcoin nodes to verify transactions without storing the entire set of unspent transaction outputs.
Buterin noted that Ethereum wants to have the best of both worlds - UTXO-style state and dynamic state. The current Ethereum scaling research focuses on a spectrum ranging from UTXO-like state for simple assets to static and temporary data structures, and fully dynamic state required by complex smart contracts.
The goal is to break the relationship between higher transaction capacity and increasingly demanding hardware requirements. Buterin has proposed 'partially stateless nodes' where node operators can maintain only portions of state relevant to them while obtaining other information when needed.