Introducing a novel approach to Ethereum consumer light clients

Blockchain technology is fundamentally characterized by its trustlessness — a quality that is essential for enabling permissionless access, ensuring security, maintaining decentralization, and guaranteeing data immutability to foster unprecedented operational scale.

In networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum, trustlessness is primarily ensured by Merkle Proofs. These cryptographic tools validate transactions and smart contract executions by efficiently proving membership within a set.

However, as blockchain networks expand — highlighted by the growing UTXO set in Bitcoin and the Merkle trees in Ethereum — the challenge of extending these trustless properties to consumer-level data access and computation intensifies. Compounding these issues are dependencies on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), which inadvertently reinstate trust to third-party providers, undermining blockchain’s core principle and introducing vulnerabilities.

This complexity underscores the importance of light clients—scaled-down versions of blockchain servers designed to enable trustless verification without the overhead of full nodes. Despite their potential, light clients face significant adoption hurdles: They primarily focus on verifying new consensus data, which leads to challenges like inefficient and costly verification processes and scalability limitations.

Pioneering a trust-distributed Ethereum light client

In response to the persistent challenges faced by traditional light clients,
in collaboration with Laconic, Stateless is proud to unveil a transformative solution that redefines user interaction with Ethereum.

Our framework shifts the verification process to a more user-centric model, leveraging popular libraries to enhance trust and simplify secure
interactions.

With this release, any application can ensure data correctness and inclusion, computation integrity, and leverage real-time verification with data availability and validity proofs. Key components include:

• Verified State: At each block, an API call is made to Stateless to
  retrieve the verified root hashes for each of the Ethereum tries
• Merkle Proofs: For the corresponding call, a request is sent from the
  client to any blockchain node in the Stateless network to retrieve
  evidence.
• Client Side Library: The combination of the verified root hash for a
  given block, alongside the provided evidence, allows the end client to
  verify that the data provided by the lookup exists in the given block.

This design effectively enables EIP-1186, paving the way for a broad suite of infrastructure and service providers to consume blockchain data via Ethereum’s eth_getProof method directly.

This approach is lightweight and allows developers to separate the entities, providing state and evidence, enhancing security, and promoting a modular, trust-minimized ecosystem.

By providing verified state data and Merkle evidence to generate Merkle
proofs through a streamlined, standardized API interface, Stateless introduces a refined layer of accountability and auditability, optimized for the modern user by tackling the inefficiencies of the current light client models with a product that is:

• Agnostic to blockchain client and data types
• Cost efficient computation, even when considering replication
• Simple to consume and scale client-side
• Supported by widely-used libraries

This first iteration paves the way for a new generation of light clients built for efficient and accessible consumer experiences.

Beyond the initial proofs made available by EIP-1186, our approach enables applications to leverage innovative networks with efficient proof distribution easily. Laconic, for example, makes these proofs faster and more accessible through the tooling they’ve built to better deliver this data to application developers.

How to get started with our consumer light client

Integrating verification into your blockchain applications has never been easier. Here’s how you can seamlessly leverage our light client in your existing workflows:

• Create an account and API key at https://app.stateless.solutions
• Install the Stateless SDK and Stateless Ethers SDK
• Stateless Provided Proofs: Create an Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, or Optimism bucket via the CLI and add a provider
• Bring Your Own Proofs (Optional): You can also bring your own proof
  provider across any EVM where the eth_getProof method is supported, be it an existing RPC node or Laconic’s ipld-eth-server for example
• Update Ethers to use your new endpoint and start sending API requests to generate proofs

With a few clicks, enhance your security, ensure data integrity, and maintain your operations' trustless ethos. Welcome to a new era of scalable, trustless technology.