# EIP-7639 - Prune calldata

Source: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7639
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/EIP-7639-Prune-calldata?index=0x676420977766980f6176fe90f779e7c95eb83a7437d622f5d0802cfd3f2c486ece36c8bb
Submitted by tim on 2024-12-19 UTC, 2 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

EIP-7639, authored by lightclient, proposes that Ethereum execution layer clients stop requesting or serving peer-to-peer block data from before the Paris upgrade, which activated proof of stake. The proposal adds an eth protocol version 70 under which clients must not make or respond to queries about block bodies or receipts before block 15537393. The text states that historical data in clients has grown to around 500 GB, with nearly 400 GB coming from pre-PoS block data. It also notes that nodes would no longer be able to full sync from the devp2p network after activation and would need to retrieve the data out-of-band.

## Article

🚧 Stagnant Standards Track: Networking

Execution layer clients will no longer serve block data before Paris over p2p.

Authors lightclient (@lightclient)

Created 2024-02-13

Discussion Link https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/cease-serving-history-before-pos/18991

Table of Contents

Abstract

Motivation

Specification

Rationale

Only Pre-PoS data

Backwards Compatibility

Security Considerations

Copyright

Abstract

Execution layer clients will no longer request or respond to p2p queries about block data before the Paris upgrade.

Motivation

As of 2024, historical data in clients has grown to around 500 GB. Nearly 400 GB of that is from block data before PoS was activated in the Paris upgrade. Long term, Ethereum plans to bound the amount of data nodes must store. This EIP proposes the first steps to achieve such goal.

Specification

Add a new eth protocol capability with version 70.

Clients connected on this version must not make or respond to p2p queries about block bodies or receipts before block 15537393.

The affected protocol messages are:

GetBlockBodies (0x05)

BlockBodies (0x06)

GetReceipts (0x0f)

Receipts (0x10)

Rationale

Only Pre-PoS data

One might ask why the distinction between pre and post PoS data is made in this EIP. The simple answer is that the at the moment of the merge, the block structure changed substantially. Although execution layer client software today continues on with block data on disk which remains similar to per-PoS data, the beacon chain is now the canonical chain definition. Therefore, a beacon block can be used to both record historical data for execution layer and beacon layer.

Over the long term, the distinctions of “execution layer” and “consensus layer” may matter less. This EIP tries to be agnostic to client architecture and instead focuses on the shape of the data.

Backwards Compatibility

After this EIP is activated, nodes will no longer be able to full sync from the devp2p network. To continue doing so, they must retrieve the data out-of-band.

Security Considerations

TODO

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

Citation

Please cite this document as:

lightclient (@lightclient), "EIP-7639: eth/70 - Cease serving history before PoS [STAGNANT]," Ethereum Improvement Proposals, no. 7639, February 2024. Available: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7639.