Light Ethereum Subprotocol (LES)

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The Light Ethereum Subprotocol (LES) is the Protocol used by “light” client (or 2.3.3.2 Lightweight Node (Wallet)) Nodes, which only download Block Headers as they appear and fetch other parts of the Blockchain on-demand. They provide full functionality in terms of safely accessing the Blockchain, but do not Mining and therefore do not take part in the Consensus Process. Full and Archival nodes can also support the les protocol besides Ethereum Wire Protocol (ETH) in order to be able to serve light nodes.

Source: https://github.com/ethereum/devp2p/blob/master/caps/les.md