Do Less: The Power of History Expiry on Ethereum

On Ep. 90 of Infinite Jungle, Christine interviews Piper Merriam, an Ethereum Foundation researcher leading efforts for history expiry on Ethereum. History expiry enables Ethereum nodes to prune old block and transaction data from their databases. It is estimated to free up 100s of GB worth of hard disk space. It is also expected to open the design space for differentiated and use case specific client software. Christine speaks to Merriam about the benefits, risks, and timeline for history expiry, as well as his views on why history expiry efforts are often underappreciated in the Ethereum community.

Guest:

Name: Piper Merriam

Title: Ethereum Foundation Researcher

Show note links:

• The Portal Network (https://ethportal.net/)

Timestamps:

(00:01:00) How Piper got involved with Ethereum

(00:08:08) How history expiry enables node differentiation

(00:14:26) The risks of history expiry

(00:21:42) The game theory behind history expiry

(00:35:38) Meet the Portal team

(00:38:27) The history expiry timeline

(00:43:28) Piper’s motivation for working on Ethereum

This episode was recorded on Friday, March 21, 2025.

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