Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, expressed his expectations for Verkle Trees in a tweet today (19th). The goal is to launch Verkle Trees on the Ethereum mainnet this year. Verkle Trees is a new data structure used in blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, aiming to improve data storage and indexing efficiency.
In his tweet, Vitalik pointed out that Verkle Trees could enable stateless verification clients, which means that verification nodes can operate with minimal disk space and achieve near-instant synchronization.
What are Verkle Trees? In the cryptocurrency community, people are more familiar with Merkle Trees, and Verkle Trees are an evolution of this technology, aiming to improve data storage and indexing efficiency. Verkle Trees use vector commitments and other mathematical techniques to make data storage more compact while maintaining data verifiability.
Imagine that the blockchain is like a huge ledger that records all transactions and operations. Whenever there is a new transaction, it needs to be recorded in this ledger. Typically, to confirm the accuracy of these records, you need to have a copy of the entire ledger, which requires a large amount of storage space and processing power.
Now, with the new technology of Verkle Trees, Ethereum can achieve “stateless verification.” This means that even if you don’t have a copy of the entire ledger, you can confirm the correctness of transactions. You only need a small file, which is like a summary of a page in the ledger, and it contains all the necessary information to confirm the correctness of a specific transaction.
There are many benefits to this approach, such as saving a lot of storage space and making the entire blockchain network run more efficiently. At the same time, to make this approach feasible, Ethereum has proposed a new rule: charging based on the amount of resources you use. For example, the more ledger pages you read, the higher the fee you need to pay.
The goal is to launch Verkle Trees on the Ethereum mainnet by 2024, according to official documents. The specific time has not been announced yet. Vitalik also stated that after the launch, it would be a huge improvement for users who stake individually and beneficial for user-oriented lightweight clients.
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