return to Full Node

In more traditional DIDOs, an archival full node is primarily responsible for storing the entire ledger and for providing consensus to the entire node network by validating blocks and potentially receiving a reward ¹⁾.

As the size of the ledgers grow, there will be fewer archival nodes and more pruned nodes. IOTA refers to these archival nodes as “permanodes” and believes that business services will evolve around either charging for the storage or charging to retrieve the data that is stored or perhaps both. In some cases, such as in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the nodes that publish data might be rewarded when or if the data is retrieved.

Note: The difference between pruned and archival nodes is that pruned nodes only keep the latest validated data and require far less storage on the local node.

Archival nodes are divided into subtypes, three that can add blocks to a blockchain and one that cannot:

• Can add blocks: authority node, staking node, and mining node
• Cannot add blocks: masternode