Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum’s Future Upgrades Could Bring Full Nodes to Mobile Devices

Ethereum Vitalik Buterin

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Fredrik Vold

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Fredrik Vold

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September 6, 2023 08:03 EDT

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Ethereum (ETH) full nodes could in the future become so light-weight that they can run on mobile devices, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has predicted.

In a speech at Korea Blockchain Week that was cited by Cointelegraph, Buterin admitted that centralization of nodes is one of the Ethereum network’s biggest challenges, given the fact that the majority of the 5,901 active Ethereum full nodes are run on centralized platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

If Buterin gets his way, however, there will come a time in the future when fully verified Ethereum nodes can “literally” run on a phone.

Making Ethereum more decentralized

According to Buterin, solving the issue with centralization of full nodes is a “big piece of the puzzle” to making Ethereum more decentralized.

The Ethereum co-founder said:

“One of those six things is making it technically easier for people to run nodes, and statelessness is one of the really important technologies in doing that right.”

He further explained why most node operators today rely on centralized services to run their nodes, saying the task requires “hundreds of gigabytes” of storage space, while noting that a concept called “statelessness” can potentially solve this.

“With stateless clients, you can run a node on basically zero,” Buterin said.

Achieving statelessness, meaning no reliance on centralized service providers to run the network, has been on the Ethereum Foundation’s roadmap for some time already, but Buterin admitted in his speech that a solution to the issue lies many years into the future.

“These technical problems will have to be addressed eventually — maybe a 10-year timescale, maybe a 20-year timescale,” Buterin said.