Ethereum has grown from a small experimental network into a critical piece of global infrastructure. Every day it settles billions of dollars in value, coordinates thousands of applications, and anchors an entire ecosystem of L2s. All of this ultimately relies on a single underlying component: state. What is “state” and why it matters A user’s balance is not stored in their wallets: It lives in Ethereum’s state. The state can roughly be thought of as “everything Ethereum knows right now”: • Accounts • Contract storage (all the data contracts have written) • Bytecode (the logic that runs when you use a smart contract) ... (full story)