Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge

The Verge is Ethereum's roadmap goal of making full verification of the chain cheap enough for ordinary devices, including mobile wallets and smart watches. The article says the main obstacle is state size, which exceeds hundreds of gigabytes and grows by about 30 GB per year. It describes stateless verification, where blocks carry witnesses with the needed state values and proofs, and compares two leading approaches: Verkle trees, with proofs of roughly 2.6 MB worst case, and STARKed binary hash trees, which depend on prover speed. It notes that Polygon proved 1.7 million Poseidon hashes per second on a laptop using circle STARKs.