Vitalik's article discusses the future development of the Ethereum protocol, The Purge, with goals including dropping storage requirements and reducing the complexity of the Ethereum protocol.

Odaily Planet Daily News Vitalik releases the future development of the Ethereum protocol (Part Five: The Purge), with the following key objectives: By reducing or eliminating the need for each Node to permanently store all historical or even state data, the client’s storage requirements are dropped; Simplify the complexity of protocol by dropping unnecessary features. In the article, it is mentioned that Ethereum (ETH) has started to move away from the mode where all nodes permanently store all historical records. ConsensusBlock (the part related to Proof of Stake Consensus) only stores for about 6 months. Blob only stores for about 18 days. EIP-4444 aims to introduce a one-year storage period for historical blocks and receipts. The long-term goal is to have a coordinated period (possibly around 18 days) during which each node is responsible for storing all content, and then the Ethereum nodes form a peer-to-peer network to store old data in a distributed manner. In addition to the need for client-side storage of transaction history, the client’s storage requirements will continue to rise, with an increase of about 50 GB per year, due to the constant rise of account balance, random numbers, contract code, and contract storage. Users can pay a one-time fee to permanently burden the current and future ETH clients. To drop protocol, two things need to be done: 01928374656574839201 Stop making changes and freeze the protocol; Ability to actually delete functionality and drop complexity. In addition, Vitalik mentioned that a more radical approach to drop complexity is to keep the protocol intact but move most of its functionality from the protocol to contract code; a gentler approach is to keep the relationship between the beacon chain and the current Ethereum execution environment unchanged, and choose RISC-V, Cairo, or other VMs as the new ‘official VM’ for Ethereum, and then forcibly convert all EVM contracts into new VM code that interprets the original code logic (through compilation or interpretation). In theory, the ‘target VM’ can even be used as an EOF version to complete this operation.