Garen Tyson from SDF explains state archival, Stellar's solution to blockchain state bloat. The protocol uses rent-based storage fees and Merkle proofs to archive inactive entries, reducing validator costs while maintaining security and user experience through RPC abstraction.
Garen Tyson, protocol engineer at the Stellar Development Foundation, discusses state archival, a novel approach to solving state bloat across all public blockchains. State bloat occurs because transactions write permanent state that validators must maintain forever, increasing network costs and reducing performance. State archival introduces rent, a recurring fee for maintaining ledger entries. When rent expires, entries are archived to a Merkle tree in history archives and removed from validators, but can be restored via Merkle proofs. The system maintains security through Merkle roots stored on validators while reducing storage burden. RPC nodes automatically handle proof generation and querying, abstracting complexity from users and developers. This approach enables faster transactions, lower fees, and network scalability while keeping archived data publicly accessible and decentralized.