In a new report about Ethereum from digital asset research firm Delphi Digital, some of the potential technical risks facing the smart-contracting platform are covered and briefly analyzed. Although the report notes that the list of risks is not exhaustive, the technical risks that are included in no particular order are the size of the blockchain, Infura centralization, cross-shard communications, and code vulnerabilities.
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1. Size of the Blockchain
The size of the blockchain should be a technical concern for any crypto asset project. It is often cited as a key aspect of the greater debate around scalability, perhaps most notably in terms of the block size limit during Bitcoin’s scaling controversy.
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According to the Delphi Digital report, the size of the Ethereum blockchain is currently 188 GB for a Geth full node and 2.12 TB for an archival node. For perspective, the report adds that the Bitcoin blockchain is around 200 GB, while also having existed for nearly twice as long as Ethereum.
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“This is a problem because the larger the blockchain grows the more difficult it becomes to independently run a node, which hurts decentralization,” notes the report.
In terms of short-term solutions, the report points to state rent and storage pruning as two proposed solutions. Longer term, the report indicates sharding should be able to help by partitioning the network in Ethereum 2.0.
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2. Infura Centralization
While the Delphi Digital report admits Infura has become an important tool for Ethereum developers, it also points out that there are centralization risks around this entity.
Infura helps developers, services, and decentralized applications (dapps) by effectively allowing them to outsource their need for a full node
