I’m not sure if this has been asked before (I looked but may have unsuccessfully), but would it be possible now or in the future to host an ETH node on the Internet Computer? I’ve been looking into running an ETH node post-merge but realize there’s a pretty serious centralization issue faced by ETH on cloud services. Would love to find a way (or a service on the IC) to initiate an ETH node hosted here.
Would anyone know if that’s possible?
Dom brought this up about a year and a half ago - would be interested in a follow up since he indicated this was going to be possible.
I doubt the IC would would be able to host a full node as it is over 1 terabyte for #Ethereum state. A light client node should be possible.
There are various “types” of Ethereum nodes, basically each type participates in different Ethereum node activies. So yes, I think right now or very soon you could build some type of Ethereum node on the IC. What its exact capabilities would be are going to be limited compared to the fullest node you could imagine on Ethereum.
For example, Summer of 2021 I built a simple version of an Ethereum archival node. It just held blocks and transactions. I uploaded the data with a Node.js script running on AWS.
It should be possible to do this type of thing without AWS very soon, once outgoing HTTP requests go live. With an implementation of the EVM, you could pull in blocks from Ethereum JSON RPC endpoints and verify all blocks and transactions and calculate state all within a canister (probably multiple canisters will be needed to store the entire state).
Actually participating in consensus I think would be very difficult because of the limited network capabilities of canisters.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, I figured as much is true though I’m less familiar with the limited network capabilities of canisters.
Is there a viable business to be had hosting ETH nodes on the IC to earn PoS reward on the ETH network?
Is this something ICDevs would consider issuing a bounty for @skilesare? Not sure if this is a high priority at the moment but given the decentralization concerns around ETH, could be a good way to educate the community on the IC
ETH consensus node is pretty heavy even it doesn’t run executions.
I know it wold be challenging and it will not be the most profitable system to run a eth node but it will be a very good for marketing IC, and also we have to remember when BTC was changing from CPU mining to GPU mining, community can make miracles sometimes, In my opinion, eth node that can run on IC it will be HUUUGE ! As amicryptola1 say ICDevs sould do that with high priority, and also don’t stop only on eth node, other blockchain node is a must. I will gladly donate some icp if somebody will work on that. If we put marketing on low priority, other chain will slowly copy IC and then we cant do anything, we have to be in front of the other.
Just imagine Eht community to shuffle some article about that. Toghether with BTC intgration it wll be very god for marketing,
quote J.F.K. 
“We choose to go to the Moon… We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too”
I’d love to do this bounty, but at this point it is a funding issue. We need funds to attract the right devs. There are also a number of pieces we have to pull together. Our current EVM bounties haven’t gotten much traction.
Let’s do a community fund raise, o lot of fund has been raised for spam proposal. I’m not skilled enugh
do do that, also my english is not very good to express myself but gladly i will make a donation.
Sounds like we need a treasury so we can perhaps fund these things better and more effectively
How much funding is required for the EVM bounties and a potential ETH node on IC @skilesare ?