'Turbo Geth' Seeks to Scale Ethereum

Alexey Akhunov, the independent software developer that built the software, told CoinDesk that unlike many other scaling solutions, Turbo Geth looks at tackling ethereum's so-called state, instead of transaction congestion and costs.

While there's still work to be done - Turbo Geth lacks many of the features users expect from a fully-functional client currently - Akhunov believes the software will inspire others to take similarly experimental approaches to design.

In essence, Turbo Geth takes what has become the dominant way of storing data in ethereum clients, called the hash tree, and replaces that structure with a highly simplified index.

The result is that for a full archive node - a type of ethereum node that stores the full history of the state - Turbo Geth creates substantial gains.

Compared the 1.2 terabytes of disk space required by Geth today, Turbo Geth users only need 252.11 gigabytes of disk space to run a full archive node.

While these gains are notable, there's work that remains to be done before Turbo Geth is an actionable client like Geth and Parity, ethereum's second most popular software client.

Still, while the client is getting close to finished, Akhunov built the software entirely on his own and emphasized that he doesn't have the capacity to deal with requests from the public - meaning that Turbo Geth is strictly in private beta for now.

Moving forward the developer envisions handing the Turbo Geth project over to a committed team so that he can continue his research into ethereum scalability.

For Akhunov, Turbo Geth doesn't quite fulfill his vision for a fully scalable ethereum.

While the storage enhancements are substantial, he said: "When I started working on Turbo Geth I made an assumption that the bottleneck is of the ethereum client is mostly its access to the state, which was true to a certain extent, but it's not 100 percent. I have changed my point of view slightly since then."