Ethereum Foundation Shifts Focus to Verkle Trees with Potential Storage Savings

The Ethereum Foundation has shifted its focus to Verkle trees in an effort to reduce the storage requirements for validators. Currently, validators need around 50 GB of storage just for the state alone, and over 150 GB including Merkle proofs. This is a significant burden, especially as the network grows.

Verkle trees use vector commitments to eliminate the need for sibling nodes, resulting in a witness size that's 23 times smaller than Merkle Patricia Tries. For example, a witness for 1,000 leaves in a Verkle tree is only 150 kB, compared to 3.5 MB for a Merkle trie.

This reduction in storage requirements could make it easier for new validators to join the network, as they would no longer need expensive hardware to store the entire state. However, there are some concerns about the security of Verkle trees. They use polynomial commitments like KZG or IPA, which rely on elliptic curve cryptography and are vulnerable to quantum computing attacks.

The Ethereum Foundation is supporting research into binary trees as an alternative, which offer quantum resistance but may not be as efficient as Verkle trees. The transition to Verkle trees will require a new data structure, gas accounting model, and comprehensive strategy to migrate the existing state from Merkle Patricia Tries to Verkle trees.

This process is part of the Hegota upgrade in the second half of 2026, following the Glamsterdam upgrade in the first half. The upgrade will involve a new set of cryptography primitives and new fields at the block level, allowing the old Patricia trie to become immutable.