KEY POINTS
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revealed the next round of changes for the network. In a paper titled “Next steps in the Purge,” Buterin along with developers Guillaume Ballet and Dankard Feist talked about Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 6780.
“This EIP is a key example of an often undervalued part of Ethereum protocol development: the effort to simplify the protocol by removing complexity and adding new security guarantees. This is a big part of what I have labeled as “The Purge”: the project of slimming down Ethereum and clearing technical debt,” the paper reads.
After the changes are made through EIP-6780, there will be a limit on how much data a contract can change in a single transaction. Also, a contract’s code can’t be changed within a single transaction. It has to stay the same from start to finish.
Besides, Ethereum is getting rid of unnecessary code to streamline things. This includes removing code that supported older ways of operating Ethereum (pre-merge), no longer needing code to handle “empty accounts” thanks to previous updates, and reducing the data that needs to be stored by nodes, making it easier to run them.
These changes make things easier for both developers who write applications for Ethereum and the people who run computers to validate transactions (node operators).
Among other things that can be removed in the future include precompiles.
Finally, the Purge will see a significant reduction in the amount network history. Currently, all Ethereum nodes store the entire history of the blockchain, which takes up a lot of space and makes it hard to run a node. EIP-4444 aims to change this by allowing nodes to delete old blocks after a while.
