History expiry (EIP-4444)

History expiry is an Ethereum proposal, EIP-4444, under which execution clients no longer have to keep every historical block body and receipt. A node still holds the current state and recent history, which is all it needs to validate new blocks; older data is pruned after a set window. The chain's integrity does not depend on that data being on every machine, because block headers and the consensus layer already commit to it.

The motivation is practical. Full history takes up hundreds of gigabytes and keeps growing, which pushes up the cost of running a node and works against decentralization. Clients began rolling out partial expiry, starting with pre-Merge history, so operators could reclaim disk space. The roadmap pairs this with statelessness, aiming for nodes that are light enough to run on modest hardware.

Expired data does not disappear: archive nodes, block explorers, indexers and distribution formats such as era files and peer-to-peer networks keep it available. The trade-off is that fetching very old transactions now relies on those providers rather than any random peer, which matters for indexers, auditors and tax tools.