TechFlow news — Research collaborators Miranda Brawner and Joe Petrowski from investment firm a16z crypto recently published an article stating that stateless blockchains, under current design approaches, face fundamental issues and are unlikely to be achievable.
Stateless blockchains mean validation nodes can maintain the complete state of an L1 blockchain at very low cost. However, this imposes enormous monitoring costs on users, requiring them to continuously track all transactions on-chain.
The authors argue that this heavy monitoring burden on users represents a fundamental flaw inherent to stateless blockchains, one that cannot be avoided by any design. However, if the requirements for statelessness are slightly relaxed—adopting a quasi-stateless design—feasible solutions may exist.
Although the conclusion is somewhat discouraging, impossibility results like this can help guide researchers toward other viable directions.
