Vitalik publishes latest article: The future of Ethereum protocol — The Verge

On October 23rd, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik released his latest article "Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge". He stated that one of the most powerful features of blockchain is that anyone can run a node on their own computer and verify the correctness of the chain. Equity holders who do not belong to such conspiracy groups will automatically gather and continue to build a chain that follows the old rules, while fully verified users will follow that chain.

However, running a fully verified node requires being feasible for a sufficient number of people. Today, running a node on a consumer laptop is possible, but it is difficult. The Verge aims to change this by making fully verified chains so economically feasible in computation that every mobile wallet, browser wallet, and even smartwatch defaults to doing so.

Initially, "Verge" referred to the idea of moving Ethereum state storage to Verkle trees - Verkle trees are a tree structure that allows for more compact proofs and enables stateless verification of Ethereum blocks.

But over the past year, Verge has become more open and there are multiple possibilities. The Verge: Key Goals

· Stateless client: Fully verified clients and staking nodes do not need more than a few GB of storage space

· (Long-term) Full chain verification (consensus and execution) on smartwatches. Download some data, verify SNARK, and you're done.