Ethanos: Efficient bootstrapping for full nodes on account-based blockchain

Abstract

Ethereum is a popular account-based blockchain whose number of accounts and transactions has skyrocketed, causing its data explosion. As a result, ordinary clients using PCs or smartphones cannot easily bootstrap as a full node, but rely on other full nodes to verify transactions, thus being exposed to security risks. The most serious overhead is caused by synchronizing the state of all accounts in the block's state trie, which takes several tens of gigabytes. Observing that more than 95% of the accounts are dormant, we propose a novel state optimization technique, named Ethanos. Ethanos downsizes the state trie by periodically emptying it, and then re-build it only with the active accounts used in the period's transactions. Ethanos runs transactions using the accounts available in the current period's state trie as well as those available at the end of the previous period's state trie. For an account in neither of the tries, the account first restores itself by transmitting a restore transaction. One important result of this state management is that a node can now bootstrap only with the latest period's state trie, yet can fully verify all transactions thereafter. We evaluated Ethanos with real Ethereum transactions for 300,000 blocks from the 7.0 million block, with a one-week period of emptying the state trie. Our result shows that Ethanos can sharply reduce the state trie, with only a tiny fraction of the restore transactions. More importantly, unlike the Ethereum state trie which continues to grow as time goes on, the Ethanos state trie size at the end of each period is bounded by a few hundred MB, when there are more than one million, one-week-active accounts.