Use cases

Stateless Ethereum allows the state of Ethereum to be proven much more efficiently, which has deep implications for the ecosystem.

As explained in this book introduction, the two main motivations are:

• Increasing the gas limit: allowing the Ethereum state efficiently in SNARKs allows the decoupling of block verification time from the gas limit.
• Improved decentralization: not requiring disk space to run an EL client allows low-powered devices to join the network and contribute to its security, fulfilling The Verge’s goal of simplifying block validation.

But the above only scratches the surface of the implications of going stateless. This is an active area of research, and we invite everybody to imagine what is possible and share their ideas.

Next, we dive deeper into which use cases going stateless unlocks. More use cases will be added to this chapter in the following months.