Titled “The Reality Gap: Could Stateless Blockchains Address the Scalability Challenge?,” the paper delves into a fundamental challenge that has been gripping the blockchain space: despite considerable efforts, attaining the theoretical promise of stateless blockchains remains impractical. A16z crypto’s research dives into this chasm between concept and application, showing how, even with ingenious solutions, an irrevocable challenge is rooting near impossible scalability problems for current blockchain implementations.
Specifically, a storage burden has been found that meets criteria of linearity, correlating to the On-Chain throughput or Transactions Per Second (TPS) of a blockchain network. For example, node holders handling Bitcoin need to hold 7GB which spikes to a daunting 650GB for Ethereum’s contemporary platforms today.
This empirical evidence from the paper indicates that any surge in TPS, such as the tens to hundreds of thousands needed to achieve mainstream adoption level transactions, could levy an on-node burden that cannot be met easily: growing from gigabytes to terabytes or even petabytes.
