Blog
Technical deep-dives, research updates, and announcements.
Cocoon Use Cases
A focused look at the four institutional use cases where Cocoon's architecture delivers concrete advantages that generic private ledger deployments cannot match: tokenized money market funds, intraday repo, cross-border wholesale payments, and tokenized securities. The market is already deploying capital in each of these areas. The question is which infrastructure is actually built for what production in regulated finance requires.
What Makes Cocoon Different
Cocoon redefines permissioned ledger architecture for regulated institutions by embedding compliance directly into the protocol layer, enforcing transaction constraints at the argument level, enabling cryptographic proof-backed data disclosure, and eliminating ecosystem lock-in. This isn’t just about faster or more private transactions; it’s about building systems institutions can actually trust, audit, and operate autonomously without relying on third parties or centralized gatekeepers.
Introducing Cocoon
Institutional finance needs to verify private ledger integrity. Cocoon is Erigon's complete stack using Zero-Knowledge Proofs to create irrefutable mathematical evidence of correctness without revealing transaction data. Zilkworm embeds compliance rules.
Erigon v3.3: Introducing the Historical Proofs Data Model
With Erigon v3.3 we announce efficient indexing for historical MPT proofs — laying the groundwork for stateless clients and ZK-proof integration at the execution layer.
Introducing Zilkworm, Erigon's C++ Path to Proving Ethereum
Zilkworm is Erigon's C++-based ZK prover for Ethereum — the only genuine alternative to the Rust monoculture. 2x faster, built on EVMOne, designed for the Gigagas era.
Partnership for Progress
An update on Erigon's unified staking experience as the only EVM client to integrate both an Execution Layer and a Consensus Layer (Caplin) in a single binary.
An Update on Our Support for Polygon
Announcement of the formal discontinuation of official Polygon support as Erigon sharpens its focus on Ethereum mainnet and ZK infrastructure.
Introducing Erigon Nitro for Arbitrum Sepolia
Erigon Nitro is now live on Arbitrum Sepolia, bringing high-performance Erigon execution to the Arbitrum developer testnet — a first step toward full mainnet deployment.
How I Reduced a Polygon Archive Node Size by +900 GB
A deep technical walkthrough of the index improvements in Erigon 3.1 that slashed Polygon archive node storage by over 900 GB — without sacrificing query performance.
Erigon 3.1 Pebble Paws
Major update packed with new features and optimisations: improved stability and performance for validators, Caplin enhancements, and ecosystem fixes.
Erigon Joins the Arbitrum Ecosystem
Partnership announcement: Erigon brings its high-performance execution client to the Arbitrum ecosystem, providing a robust alternative client implementation for Arbitrum chains.
Introducing Named Releases
Erigon v3.0.1 marks the introduction of named major version releases — a new milestone-based approach to communicating the significance of each version.
Superchains and Unified Portal Network
An explanation of optimistic rollup concepts and alternative development directions for superchain infrastructure, exploring the path toward a unified portal network.
What Will Ethereum Do? State Rent, Stateless, Regenesis, and Portal Network
Addressing Ethereum's long-standing state growth problem and the four possible paths forward: state rent, stateless clients, regenesis, or the Portal Network.
Erigon 2025 Roadmap
2025 marks a turning point for Erigon. The roadmap covers the ZK pivot, Zilkworm development, infrastructure scaling, and the long-term vision for the Erigon stack.
Solana, Celestia, Ethereum's Grand Strategy, Rollups
A comparative analysis of blockchain architecture across Solana, Celestia, and Ethereum — examining modular vs monolithic trade-offs and the role of rollups in each grand strategy.
What Did Solana Do? Technical Comparison: Solana vs Ethereum
A rigorous technical comparison of Solana and Ethereum — covering consensus, execution, state management, and the design decisions behind each chain's performance profile.
Releasing Erigon v3.0.0
The first production release of Erigon 3 — with a deprecation notice for Erigon 2 by May 1, 2025. Covers the architecture changes, new features, and migration guidance.
A Lean Approach to Fusaka: Our Stance on a Minimal Fork
Erigon's position on the Fusaka upgrade: advocate for a minimal, high-impact fork rather than a kitchen-sink approach — and the reasoning behind this stance.
Existential Decisions for Ethereum
Alexey addresses concerns about key Ethereum development decisions that could affect the network’s long-term competitiveness and the client diversity that underpins it.
The Case for Programmatically Accelerating Ethereum's Network Capacity
An examination of Ethereum's scaling capacity challenges and the argument for a programmatic, data-driven approach to increasing throughput beyond current L2 assumptions.
Making Ethereum a Rollup of Itself
A theoretical exploration of using ZK proofs to turn Ethereum mainnet into a rollup of itself — radically increasing gas limits while preserving decentralisation.
Announcing Erigon v3 Beta-1
The first public Beta of Erigon v3 — focused on efficiency, scalability, and usability for node operators. Covers the new architecture and what it means for validators and archive users.
Benefits of Caplin (Erigon's Internal CL) and Erigon (EL) for Staking
Caplin and Erigon form an integrated solution for Ethereum staking, delivering improved performance, reduced resource requirements, and superior throughput for validators.
Announcing Erigon v3 Alpha 6: Focus on Staking and Full Node Performance
Erigon v3 Alpha 6 transitions its default configuration from archive to full node mode while introducing staking capabilities and performance optimizations designed to make Ethereum node operation more accessible.
Are we finally ready for a gas limit increase?
An analysis of whether Ethereum's gas limit can safely be increased today, examining worst-case and average-case scenarios for bandwidth, computation, and storage if the limit were doubled to 60 million gas.
Erigon 3, Alpha 2: Introducing blazingly fast sync on archive nodes with OtterSync and other improvements
Alpha 2 of Erigon 3 introduces OtterSync — the fastest Ethereum node sync algorithm ever created — enabling archive node setup in mere hours, alongside 25% chain tip improvements and extensive bug fixes.
Erigon 3 (Alpha 1), the first all-in-one EVM-node on the efficient software frontier, is live.
Erigon 3 Alpha 1 launches as the world's first all-in-one EVM node — combining Execution Layer and Consensus Layer, optimized for archive, full and pruned configurations, with transaction-level state granularity and a target of 1 Ggas/sec block production.
The rise of Erigon 3 and our new release cycle
After over a year of research and development, Erigon 3 is nearly ready. This post outlines the new release cycle, branch structure, and the transition from Erigon 2 to Erigon 3.
Erigon++
Erigon++ brings C++ performance to Erigon by embedding Silkworm as a native library — delivering 30% faster block execution and 2x–4x faster RPC throughput, available as an experimental opt-in from Erigon v2.59.0.
Releasing Caplin's Archival format.
Caplin's new archival format for beacon blockchain data significantly reduces I/O operations, delivers better latency, and enables more efficient data processing for Ethereum archival nodes.
Erigon's Roadmap to 2024
Erigon's 2024 roadmap covering Erigon 3, Erigon++, Caplin Full Archive Node, Otterscan enhancements, and a greater focus on code quality and QA.
Update on Caplin and Roadmap: Building a Consensus Layer Client to work with Erigon without the Engine API.
An update on Caplin, Erigon's internal consensus layer client, covering its motivation, achievable benefits, four-phase development roadmap, and early performance benchmarks.
Merging Erigon 3 and Erigon 4, and possibly Caplin
Erigon's development team explains their decision to consolidate Erigon 3 and Erigon 4 into a single non-backwards-compatible upgrade, and the possibility of including Caplin in that same release.
Erigon receives $200,000 grant from BNB Chain to advance technological roadmap
Erigon has been awarded a $200,000 grant from BNB Chain to support team expansion, diagnostics tooling, and the advancement of Erigon 3, Erigon 4, and Caplin.
Update on the support for BSC and Polygon in Erigon. Recruitment ideas.
BSC support moves to an independent project, Polygon/Bor agreement reached, and a new task-based recruitment approach using four stepping-stone projects.
Announcing Caplin: Erigon Full Consensus Layer is Now Live
Erigon v2.43.0 introduces Caplin, a full embedded consensus layer client, while sunsetting the previous Consensus Lightclient project.
Beacon API and why node operators hate it.
An examination of the Beacon API's three major pain points: excessive data verbosity, inefficient state queries, and the absence of meaningful indexing.
Erigon-CL "Endgame" Structure, state of the art, first-working implementation.
A look at the Erigon-CL project's final hybrid staged sync architecture, current implementation progress, and plans to replace the consensus layer lightclient.
Beacon epoch transition and optimizations made along the way.
How aggressive caching and parallelized BLS verification brought slot processing time from 2 seconds down to 300ms in Erigon-CL's epoch and slot transition functions.
Future of the support of BNB Smart Chain and Bor (Polygon) in Erigon
Erigon announces a deadline for BNB Smart Chain and Polygon Bor support, proposing a reversed funding model where chains must apply to Erigon for continued maintenance rather than the team seeking grants.
Erigon-CL Beacon State Transition and Database Footprint Improvements
Giulio Rebuffo shares progress on single-slot beacon state transition for Altair and Bellatrix forks, and reports improved database storage from 70 GB down to 63 GB through aggregation bit optimizations.
Ethereum Real Merge In Erigon
Giulio Rebuffo introduces the "Real Merge" concept for Erigon — using the internal Consensus Client to eliminate duplicate block storage, three redundant syncs, and DevP2P dependency from the Execution Layer.
Thoughts about Consensus Layer Re-Archittecturing, current state of the art and Erigon custom EL↔CL communication protocol
Giulio Rebuffo critiques the Engine API's design flaws — misuse, lack of flexibility, network bloat, non-modularity — and presents a working prototype of Erigon's own EL↔CL communication protocol that syncs Goerli and Mainnet.
Beacon State Optimizations, Proposer Index computation and choice of structures formatting
Giulio Rebuffo covers 9x and 20x performance gains for Beacon State Merkle Root computation via CPU-native vector operations, external contributor progress on state transition, and a trade-off analysis of Raw SSZ vs CBOR vs Snappy SSZ for internal database storage.
Beacon State Trie Root and Beacon Reverse Downloader
Giulio Rebuffo explains how he implemented correct Beacon State Merkle Root computation with depth-5 caching (up to 300x improvement), and introduces the Beacon Reverse Downloader concept to replace the ETH1 downloader with an ETH2-based backward block validation approach.
Current status of Silkworm and SilkRPC projects (Ethereum C++)
Silkworm is a high-performance Ethereum node implementation compatible with Erigon's ETH Sentry component, while SilkRPC is compatible with Erigon's ETH core and TxPool components. Built with performance as a top priority, Silkworm leverages evmone (the fastest fully compatible EVM interpreter) and MDBX (a fast embedded key-value store with full ACID transactions), outperforming Erigon in processing speed across all currently implemented stages. Both projects are licensed under Apache 2.0.xxx