Sublinear State Growth

Definition ∞ Sublinear State Growth describes a desirable characteristic in blockchain networks where the increase in the network’s state size grows at a slower rate than the number of transactions or users. This means that as the network processes more activity, the storage and computational demands on individual nodes increase proportionally less. Achieving this helps maintain network accessibility and decentralization. It is a key metric for scalability.
Context ∞ The pursuit of Sublinear State Growth is a primary objective for blockchain architects aiming to enhance scalability and sustainability. Current research focuses on advanced data structures and pruning techniques to minimize the growth of the blockchain state. Achieving this growth pattern is essential for supporting a global, high-throughput decentralized system without imposing excessive hardware requirements on network participants.