This post presents a complete, independent research arc into solving Ethereum’s state bloat problem via state expiry and stateless validation. The work documents an iterative design process, from an initial market-based system to a final, provably secure, protocol-native architecture (V4).
The core problem is well-known: unbounded state growth threatens decentralization. This research provides a concrete, end-to-end specification to address it.
The Research Journey: Design, Break, Repeat, Harden
The methodology was to design a system, subject it to rigorous adversarial analysis, document its failures, and use those findings to build a hardened successor.
- V1/V2 (Market-Based System): A plausible design using a Continuous Proof Market (CPM) for witness provision.
- V2 Attack Analysis: Our own red-teaming identified 20+ attack vectors, proving the market-based approach is fundamentally unstable and prone to cartelization.
- V3 (Protocol-Native): A complete architectural pivot, eliminating the market by embedding Verkle proofs directly into a new EIP-2718 transaction type.
- V3 Attack Analysis: A second round of adversarial analysis uncovered more subtle economic exploits, primarily related to the underpricing of computational complexity in the gas model.
- V4 (Final Specification): A hardened architecture that addresses all previously identified vulnerabilities.
Key Innovations of the V4 Architecture:
- Protocol-Native Witness Inclusion (PNWI): Eliminates external markets and their associated attack surfaces. Witness validity becomes a core consensus concern.
- Cryptographically-Grounded Gas Model: Replaces heuristics with verifiable proof properties, using quadratic depth scaling to make complexity underpricing attacks economically non-viable.
- Active Defense Mempool: Introduces a multi-factor Transaction Threat Score (TTS) to proactively identify and reject malicious or fragmented transactions before they enter a block.
- Formally Proven Security: The V4 design includes formal proofs for key properties, including gas underpricing impossibility and economic sustainability against coordinated drain attacks.
Conclusion
The V4 specification represents a complete, production-ready blueprint for implementing state expiry. The iterative and adversarial nature of this research has produced a robust design that anticipates and mitigates sophisticated attack vectors.
The full research, including all seven whitepapers detailing the V1-V4 evolution, security analyses, performance benchmarks, and code specifications, is available at the following repository:
https://github.com/saidonnet/revival-precompile-research
This work is now public for the community’s consideration. The repository contains funding links for those who wish to see this specification move toward a production implementation.