Tadge Drea, one of the inventors of the Lightning Network, provides an update on the Utreexo project, which is among the most important and least appreciated projects for scaling #البيتكوين .

The problem is that every Bitcoin node needs to store the entire set of Bitcoin UTXOs in order to verify transactions, and its size is currently around 11 gigabytes and continues to grow with more transactions and global adoption. And unlike old blocks that can be pruned, this set cannot be pruned and keeps expanding, which increases the storage burden on node operators.

Utreexo offers a radical solution by removing the need to store this entire set. Instead of 11 gigabytes, the node retains less than 1 kilobyte of hashed values, while continuing to perform full verification of all transactions. This is not a lightweight client and does not rely on trusting another party; it provides full verification with extremely low storage requirements.

The main challenge was bandwidth usage, because Utreexo nodes need to download additional proof data, which made chain synchronization require 2 to 3 times more data than normal nodes—reaching terabytes. But new aggregation techniques within SwiftSync have almost removed this burden. Although the final implementation is still in the process of being completed, the hardest part has already been overcome.

Utreexo is also resistant to quantum computing, because it relies entirely on hash functions rather than elliptic-curve cryptography, meaning that any future impact of quantum computing on Bitcoin signatures will not affect it. The project also addresses the “السبام” debate on the network, such as inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and heavy data that inflates the output set, since the node in Utreexo does not store this set at all, making its size irrelevant.

New versions have been released for both utreexod built on BTCD and Floresta built using Rust with rust-bitcoin. These releases are still in testing and are not ready for real funds, but they are available for developers and node operators to try. And this kind of quiet foundational work is an example of actual Bitcoin scaling on the base layer—without a new token, investment funding, or media hype—just deep engineering improvements.
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