AWCV: Adaptive Witness Compression for Stateless Ethereum Using Verkle Trees

Abstract

Abstract Stateless Ethereum is one of the most promising directions for improving blockchain scalability, but witness size remains a major deployment challenge. Existing witness generation techniques often treat all transaction workloads uniformly, resulting in unnecessary communication overhead and reduced verification efficiency. This paper presents AWCV (Adaptive Witness Compression for Stateless Ethereum Using Verkle Trees), an adaptive compression framework that reduces witness size while preserving efficient verification. AWCV combines locality-aware transaction clustering, subtree deduplication, adaptive witness construction, and delta encoding to eliminate redundant proof data without modifying Ethereum's verification semantics. The proposed framework is evaluated across representative blockchain workloads and demonstrates significant reductions in witness size, bandwidth requirements, and verification latency compared with conventional witness generation approaches. AWCV remains fully compatible with Ethereum's Verkle Tree roadmap while improving the practicality of stateless client synchronization and scalable decentralized applications. The results suggest that adaptive witness compression provides an effective and practical path toward efficient Stateless Ethereum deployments without sacrificing security or correctness.