Stellar (XLM) Introduces State Archival to Combat Blockchain State Bloat

The Stellar Development Foundation has unveiled its innovative solution to the persistent issue of state bloat in blockchain technology, known as State Archival, according to Stellar. This approach is set to enhance the scalability, transaction speed, and overall cost-efficiency of the Stellar (XLM) network.

Addressing State Bloat

State bloat has long been a challenge for blockchain networks, leading to increased costs, slower transaction processing, and scalability issues. Stellar's State Archival aims to mitigate these problems by maintaining small databases for validators. This results in faster transaction execution and higher throughput, making the Stellar network one of the most scalable in the industry.

Moreover, the smaller databases allow new nodes to sync quickly with the network, reducing the size of the ledger history and consequently lowering costs. While non-validator nodes still need to store the archived state, this process remains efficient. The Archived State Tree (AST) is an immutable, append-only data structure, enabling History Archives to store it on cost-effective network drives rather than expensive local NVMe drives required for high-performance validators.

Efficiency and Security

The immutable nature of the AST allows for sharding, which is particularly beneficial for Remote Procedure Call (RPC) providers. They can shard the archived state across multiple nodes and balance incoming requests accordingly. Since RPC nodes operate off-chain and do not participate in consensus, this sharding method is highly efficient and poses no security risks compared to validator sharding.

This design ensures that developers and users experience a highly scalable and user-friendly system. The reduction in the number of copies of the archived state, without compromising security or decentralization, further enhances the system's efficiency.

Future Developments

While the introduction of State Archival marks a significant step forward, Stellar plans to delve deeper into the protocol's security and performance optimization features in the coming weeks. Future blog posts will compare the scalability of Stellar's solution to other blockchain networks like Solana and Ethereum.

For those interested in the technical specifications, detailed documentation on the State Archival Interface and proof specifications are available on Stellar’s GitHub repository.