The Ethereum Clients | Divyansh Rai

The Ethereum Clients

As the Ethereum network is distributed and connected over the internet everybody can join the network by setting up a node and therewith participating in the network. To setup you own node on your computer you need an Ethereum client software.

Many Ethereum clients exists and you can choose clients which are implemented in a variety of programming languages. A list of actively maintained Ethereum client projects can be found at https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/#execution-clients.

Type of Node

The Ethereum network supports different kind of Nodes:

• Full Node
• Light Node
• Archive Node

Let’s examine the main differences of these three Node types.

First of all a Full Node is the standard node type which is used. It contains a full set of the full Ethereum blockchain data. A Full Node:

• Stores the full blockchain data on disk and can serve the network with any data on request.
• Participates in block validation.
• Verifies blocks and states.

In contrast a Light Node:

• Doesn’t store the entire blockchain data on disk. Instead it stores only the header information of each block and only retrieves additional information if needed from Full Nodes accessible in the network.
• Requires less storage capacity on the computer.

An Archive Node:

• Stores everything which is kept in a Full Node and builds an archive of historical states.
• Is needed if you want to query a historian state of the blockchain like an account balance at a specific block number.