Ethereum’s (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently took to X to talk about how optimistic he is about Verkle trees. This upgrade is part of Ethereum’s ambitious roadmap, one that aims to enhance the protocol’s efficiency, security, and scalability.
The introduction of Verkle trees is a pivotal advancement. It is expected to enable stateless validator clients, while contributing to solo staking in Ethereum.
Understanding Verkle trees
Verkle trees, a blend of vector commitments and Merkle trees, help to streamline the way Ethereum nodes validate transactions and state changes. These trees reduce the size of proofs required to validate the blockchain’s state from megabytes to just a few kilobytes.
The structure of Verkle trees allows them to be much flatter than their predecessors. This means fewer intermediate nodes will link a leaf (transaction or state change) to the root (the starting point of the tree).
Buterin’s vision with Verkle trees
Back in December 2021, Buterin took to X (formerly Twitter) to lay down the roadmap for Ethereum. Five fundamental developmental phases were highlighted, namely – The Merge, The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge.
The implementation of Verkle trees is the primary step towards achieving the “Verge” phase of Ethereum’s development. This phase focuses on enhancing the network’s scalability and reducing its carbon footprint. This upgrade will lower the hardware requirements for running an Ethereum node, thereby promoting greater decentralization. Furthermore, the reduced proof sizes facilitate faster and more efficient network synchronization and state verification.
Solo staking, but better
The Verkle trees upgrade also introduces improvements that could make solo staking more accessible to individual validators by reducing the operational costs and technical barriers associated
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Author: Prakriti Chanda