Catenaa, Tuesday, 27, 2025-Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled a new proposal aimed at simplifying and lowering the cost of running Ethereum nodes, potentially making them accessible to everyday users with standard consumer hardware.
Currently, operating a full Ethereum node requires storing over 1.3 terabytes of data, a barrier for most due to high storage and computing demands. Buterin’s plan introduces a “local-first” approach, where nodes track only the data relevant to their users and fetch other information on demand.
This design shifts historical blockchain data older than 36 days to distributed storage across multiple nodes.
Buterin emphasized that this model preserves trustlessness, censorship resistance, and privacy, while reducing overhead costs that remain impractically high under the current system.
The proposal aligns with Ethereum’s broader Pectra upgrade, the network’s most ambitious update to date, which aims to make nodes lightweight enough to run on devices like smartphones.
Industry experts welcomed the move. Michael Cameron, co-founder of Vanilla Finance, called it a “breath of fresh air,” while Tiger Research’s Ryan Yoon noted that distributing data geographically would mitigate centralization risks.
However, they warned that the system’s success depends on widespread node participation and introduces complexity related to state selection and fallback mechanisms.
The proposal comes amid the Ethereum Foundation’s recent Trillion Dollar Security Initiative, designed to enhance the network’s resilience and support the long-term goal of creating “civilization-scale infrastructure.”
Buterin sees easier personal node operation as critical to maintaining Ethereum’s decentralized ethos and preventing censorship risks associated with reliance on a few dominant service providers.
