Summary

Compilation of State Bloat Solutions

I've spent some time compiling and summarize all available state bloat solutions that I found (not limited to Ethereum only). I also came up with my variant of solution, but it's still a rough idea. Here's the notes.

Conversations

I've also had some conversations with Ignacio and Guillaume to get some context on state expiry. Here are the summarized points:

• While weak statelessness doesn't technically solve the state bloat problem, the responsibility of storing data is solely placed on block producers, which shouldn't be as bad as we think.
• Ideally, state expiry should come with a state revive feature. Imagine if L2 has some bug in the contract where some underlying state of the rollup couldn't be recovered, then it's gonna be doomed for them.
• Perhaps some kind of enshrined MEV could help compensate block producers for storing state.
• State expiry isn't considered for verkle trie migration method because it requires ASE (based on Vitalik's model) and there wasn't enough motivation to work on an implementation of it.
• Could look into Stellar's bloom filter method.

I also obtained brief updates from various clients on the latest progress of implementing verkle trie components:

• Prysm: Had a PoC repo, but it's now dead
• Reth: Have plans for VKT, but not for now

While studying Stellar's latest state expiry solution, I got in touch with their community through Discord and obtained some knowledge on how their scheme works. But I still haven't connect with the main dev who leads the state expiry project, so will put this under week 3's tasks.

Readings

This week, I continued to study some cryptography knowledge covering group theory. I also studied the consensus layer's specs for VKT.

New Miniproject

In week 3, I would like to start and complete a mini project. Essentially, I would like to know exactly how much space has been wastedfor the past 1 year, down to the trie node level. This would help me understand the state expiry scheme better and make a better decision when choosing which state expiry scheme to dive deeper in the future.

Daily Updates

To ensure consistency, I post daily updates (on weekdays) on what I did for EPF. Check out my daily updates this week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday

Next week's Action Items

• Complete the miniproject
• Connect with Stellar's state expiry dev
• Continue to study cryptography math