Cease serving history before PoS

Abstract

Execution layer clients will no longer request or respond to p2p queries about block data before the Paris upgrade.

Motivation

As of 2024, historical data in clients has grown to around 500 GB. Nearly 400 GB of that is from block data before PoS was activated in the Paris upgrade. Long term, Ethereum plans to bound the amount of data nodes must store. This EIP proposes the first steps to achieve such goal.

Specification

Clients must not make or respond to p2p queries about blocks before block 15537393.

Rationale

Only Pre-PoS data

One might ask why the distinction between pre and post PoS data is made in this EIP. The simple answer is that the at the moment of the merge, the block structure changed substantially. Although execution layer client software today continues on with block data on disk which remains similar to per-PoS data, the beacon chain is now the canonical chain definition. Therefore, a beacon block can be used to both record historical data for execution layer and beacon layer.

Over the long term, the distinctions of "execution layer" and "consensus layer" may matter less. This EIP tries to be agnostic to client architecture and instead focuses on the shape of the data.

Backwards Compatibility

After this EIP is activated, nodes will no longer be able to full sync from the devp2p network. To continue doing so, they must retrieve the data out-of-band.

Security Considerations

TODO

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.