Fantom Founder Andre Cronje Reflects On Bitcoin & Ethereum’s State Bloat Problem

Fantom co-founder Andre Cronje, known as the godfather of decentralized finance (DeFi), further raised concerns over probabilistic finality in blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum as the market sees expanding use cases and adoption in traditional finance. He said Fantom has already solved state bloat as Ethereum developers look to solve state bloat in the chain.

Andre Cronje Says Fantom Has Resolved State Bloat Issue

In response to Ambient Finance founder Doug Colkitt’s belief that Ethereum is the only chain looking to solve state bloat in its long-term plan, Andre Cronje said “I am pretty confident in saying we already solved state bloat at Fantom.”

Ethereum roadmap entails using Verkle trees to allow for “data to be small enough to be attached to every block.” It could help validators and nodes to become stateless as all ‘state’ can be stored more efficiently off-chain.

However, Andre Cronje said any blockchain that uses probabilistic finality or any variant of the longest chain rule won’t resolve this issue. Bitcoin and Ethereum chains depend on probabilistic finality. Finality refers to when a block of transactions is considered permanent and cannot be altered or reversed.

Fantom uses aBFT (Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism, which does not require the longest chain rule.

Moreover, Fantom introduced the new database Carmen, a flat storage method that does not use tree or dictionary structures while maintaining a cryptographic signature of the world state. This greatly reduces the bloat of the current active state (two epochs). Carmen supports real-time pruning, and although archive nodes still need to retain all data, most validators can enable pruning.

After adopting the above technology, Fantom’s status is reduced from about 2TB (archive) to 60GB (archive). Cronje said state bloat has been one of Fantom’s core milestones since its early days.

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