Buterin’s New Proposal Aims to Decentralize Ethereum with Local-First Syncing

One of the cryptocurrency's co-founders, Vitalik Buterin, wants to make it easier for average users to manage Ethereum nodes by changing the way they communicate with the network using standard consumer hardware.

A full Ethereum node requires more than 1.3 terabytes of storage, according to Etherscan. Users without specialized hardware or cloud resources find it challenging to fully engage in the network due to this storage requirement. Buterin admits that even with efficiency gains, the overhead is still unfeasible and will probably continue to be costly.

Source: X

Introducing the Local-First Model

Instead of storing the complete blockchain, Buterin suggests a "local-first" paradigm in which nodes only store the information that is pertinent to the user. For shared storage, historical data older than 36 days would be split up across several nodes. This method is similar to a library system where books can be requested from any branch but are not always available.

This suggestion is in line with Ethereum's larger plan, which also includes the most ambitious system update to date—the Pectra upgrade—which was just released. Buterin highlights the dangers of censorship associated with relying on a small number of powerful providers and the benefits of simplifying the operation of personal nodes.

Vanilla Finance co-founder Michael Cameron calls the plan a "breath of fresh air." He points out that although Ethereum's most recent technologies provide anonymity and trustlessness, the risks of depending on a small number of powerful actors are highlighted by their computational overhead and metadata vulnerabilities. But he also notes that putting the local-first paradigm into practice would include robust fallback alternatives and state subset selection procedures, which could increase complexity.

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According to Ryan Yoon, senior analyst at Tiger Research, increasing the number of nodes and dispersing them geographically would help the network avoid centralization problems. However, putting this model into practice would require careful consideration.

The Path Forward

The community views the local-first concept as a worthwhile attempt, despite the fact that there are still obstacles to overcome. Ethereum can increase its decentralization and censorship resistance by allowing more users to run nodes on standard consumer hardware.