Ethereum Sync Times Plummet with EIP-4444 Upgrade

The Ethereum network has undergone significant improvements with the activation of EIP-4444 on July 8, 2025. This upgrade allows execution clients to prune pre-Merge historical data, reducing storage requirements by 300 to 500 GB.

As a result, new nodes can sync in under half a day, a substantial improvement from the multi-day sync processes and terabyte-plus storage demands that previously greeted new node operators. In fact, nodes can now run on a 2 TB disk with aggressive settings, keeping total storage under 0.5 TB.

EIP-4444 introduces 'partial history expiry,' which allows nodes to drop older data after a defined retention period of approximately 82,000 epochs, or about one year of history. This change affects full nodes and validators but not archive nodes, which will continue storing everything.