Stellar and Solana developers discuss state bloat solutions: Solana's compression and binary trie approach versus Stellar's rent-based system with sharded Merkle trees. Both aim to balance low fees with preventing spam while maintaining data availability.
In this technical discussion, Solana's Anatoly and Stellar's Garen compare approaches to solving state bloat on their respective blockchains. Solana initially used rent but found developers preferred prepaying for storage, so they pivoted to compression using stateless accumulators and binary tries to archive cold state. Stellar uses a base reserve system but is implementing rent to prevent spam more effectively than one-time fees. Key differences: Solana uses a single global account trie requiring validators to store archived state, while Stellar uses sharded immutable Merkle trees distributing the load. Both acknowledge trade-offs between cost, complexity, and data availability. Stellar emphasizes RPC-layer complexity handling to protect users, while Solana relies on market incentives and external storage protocols like Filecoin for long-term archival.