Ethereum EIP would cut block retention to 36 days

Ethereum developer kevaundray introduced EIP-12188, a proposal to shorten how long consensus-layer clients are required to retain historical block data. The change would cut the retention window from 33,024 epochs to 8,192 epochs, roughly 36 days, easing the long-term storage burden on anyone running a node.

The proposal has entered public review, the stage at which client teams and the wider developer community weigh in before any move toward formal adoption. Lighthouse, one of Ethereum's major consensus-layer clients, has already signalled support. Storage costs from Ethereum's growing chain history have been a recurring point of debate among the network's core developers.

A shorter retention window lowers the resources a node operator has to maintain over time, a small change that compounds for anyone running multiple validators.