One post tagged with "state-expiry"

Correction, 2026-07-04: the dormant-storage-slot analysis in this post still stands, but the headline byte count was wrong for the sentence I wrote. I used mainnet.fct_execution_state_size_daily.total_bytes as "total state," then described storage-trie bytes as part of that total. The same Feb 26 row's exposed byte components sum to 430.9 GB, not 295.9 GB. I wrote up the correction here: The state-size total I used was not the total.

Every full Ethereum node is currently lugging around 430.9 GB of exposed state-size components. Every account, every contract, every storage slot, and the trie nodes wrapped around them. Sync a fresh node and you're downloading all of it. Run a node continuously and you're holding all of it in your database, forever.

The uncomfortable truth: the vast majority of that state is dead. It hasn't moved in over a year. The addresses are abandoned, the contracts are deprecated, the protocols are gone. The data just... sits there. In every node on the network.