Stellar introduces State Archival, a protocol solution to blockchain state bloat that archives unused ledger entries while maintaining security through Merkle proofs stored in History Archives. This approach enables Stellar to maintain low validator costs, high throughput, and scalability without requiring expensive hardware.
State bloat—the accumulation of unused data that validators must permanently store—is a critical scalability challenge for all blockchains. Stellar's State Archival protocol addresses this by associating rent balances with ledger entries; when rent expires, entries are archived and deleted from validator databases but remain secured by the blockchain through immutable Merkle trees in History Archives. Users can restore archived entries via trustless proofs during transaction simulation, with RPC nodes handling most complexity transparently. This design keeps validator databases small (enabling high TPS and low operating costs), allows efficient sharding of archived state across RPC providers, and maintains Stellar's position as an industry-leading scalable layer 1. The protocol is already live on mainnet for the interface, with full archival deletion coming soon.
