This article compares Stellar's State Archival solution with Solana's State Compression (Avocado), arguing that Stellar's approach is more efficient and scalable. The analysis highlights fundamental flaws in Solana's design including poor data availability guarantees, increased network congestion, and higher costs.
Part 2 of a deep-dive series on state bloat, this article examines how Stellar's State Archival and Solana's State Compression (Avocado) address blockchain scalability differently. While both use similar high-level strategies of archiving expired accounts, Solana's implementation has critical flaws: RPC nodes must store all compressed data without protocol guarantees, creating data availability risks; the design incentivizes validators to submit redundant compression transactions, increasing network congestion; and the single-trie architecture prevents sharding, making it expensive to operate. Stellar's approach uses small, immutable Merkle trees stored in History Archives with protocol-level guarantees, deterministic archival schedules requiring no extra transactions, and shardable state that reduces costs for validators and RPC nodes. The article concludes that Stellar's design is fundamentally more scalable and sustainable.
