Vitalik Buterin and Polygon co-founder discuss Ethereum data storage

According to U.Today, Polygon co-founders Mihailo Bjelic and Vitalik Buterin discussed the optimal functionality of Ethereum (ETH) and its data storage. Bjelic raised a question, wondering if developers are sure that switching Ethereum to Verkle trees is the right move, as the likelihood of its zkification is quite high. Vitalik Buterin stated that “zkifying a keccak merkle patricia tree with a worst-case witness size of 300 MB is impossible.” It’s worth noting that the Merkle Patricia tree is the primary data structure currently used inside the Ethereum blockchain . This data storage structure has its limitations, and there are plans to soon replace it with Verkle trees with shorter proofs and increased bandwidth. Based on the capacity of the Polygon zkEVM, Bjelic believes the current structure can handle the 300 MB benchmark mentioned by Buterin. The Polygon founder noted that the protocol can easily do this even with a total block time of 12 seconds. However, he admitted that to achieve this, about 10 server-class CPUs would be needed. According to Vitalik Buterin, Merkle trees were not designed to be compatible with ZK technology. However, he noted that Verkle trees with vector elements were designed to ultimately help achieve this goal.