Garen Tyson from SDF explains Stellar's state archival protocol, which solves blockchain state bloat by charging rent for storage instead of one-time fees. Archived entries can be restored via Merkle proofs, with RPC nodes handling complexity transparently for users and developers.
Garen Tyson, protocol engineer at the Stellar Development Foundation, discusses state archival, a novel solution to state bloat that affects all public blockchains. The problem: validators must permanently store all state written by transactions, increasing network costs and reducing transaction throughput. State archival charges recurring rent for ledger storage; entries that run out of rent are archived to a Merkle tree in history archives and can be restored via Merkle proofs. Stellar is the first blockchain to implement this. The protocol stores Merkle roots on validators while archived data lives in immutable history archives on cheap storage. RPC nodes automatically download Merkle trees and generate proofs during transaction simulation, abstracting complexity from users and developers. Wallet applications can query both live and archived state in a single RPC call. The result: faster transactions, lower fees, and a more sustainable network without requiring users to understand the underlying mechanism.