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 coarsegrained 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 SLI-MARCHIVE 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.