SlimArchive: A Lightweight Architecture for Ethereum Archive Nodes

With the rapid development of Ethereum, archive nodes that record all historical states have become a critical component of the infrastructure. However, current archive nodes suffer enormous storage requirements and poor performance due to the inefficient authenticated Merkle Patricia Trie and coarse-grained state granularity.

This paper presents a lightweight and high-performance architecture for Ethereum archive nodes to address the two limitations mentioned earlier. The core idea of our approach is to maintain compacted, flattened, and fine-grained (i.e., transaction-level) historical states by flattening the minimum state changes of each transaction required for the world state. Our method maintains an archive node with minimum storage requirements while providing high-performance state access. We have implemented a prototype system named SLIMARCHIVE for Ethereum. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach reduces storage requirements by 98.1%, improves state access throughput by 19.0×, and speeds up transaction execution by an average of 1112.5×, compared to vanilla Geth.