Ethereum Prepares for 90 Percent Storage Reduction with Hegota Upgrade

Ethereum is addressing its state management issue through a significant upgrade known as Hegota. The current Merkle Patricia Trie requires large amounts of disk space and fast memory, resulting in high hardware costs that prevent many users from running independent nodes.

The September shadow fork reduced node state by 40 percent, highlighting the difficulty of managing Ethereum's expanding state. A research paper measured the Ethereum state trie at 8.6 levels in depth, requiring multiple database reads for a single lookup and taking up around 150 GB of space to hold all Merkle proofs.

Verkle trees offer a solution by using vector commitments instead of standard hashes, allowing for stateless clients that verify blocks using small witnesses instead of a full database. This results in a shallower tree due to the 256-way branching factor and reduces witness size from 3.5 MB to 150 kB.