6. State Management

6.1 Merkle-Patricia Trie (MPT)

Kortana uses a single Ethereum-compatible Merkle-Patricia Trie for the world state. Both EVM and KVM execution engines read and write to this exact same trie structure.

6.2 World State & Account Model

The world state maps addresses to AccountState.

• Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs): Controlled by a private key. Have a nonce and balance, but empty storageRoot and codeHash.
• Contract Accounts: Controlled by their code. Have a nonce, balance, storageRoot (pointing to a sub-trie of contract data), and a codeHash.

6.3 State Proofs (EIP-1186)

Because the state trie format matches Ethereum, Kortana natively supports EIP-1186, allowing clients to request cryptographically verifiable Merkle proofs (eth_getProof) of an account's balance or storage slot.

6.4 Known Limitation: No Archive State

[!WARNING] Kortana does not currently maintain an archive state. The world state stores data by current value. State query methods (eth_getBalance, eth_getStorageAt) accept a block parameter but will ignore historical parameters and return the current state. Tooling querying historical balances will silently receive the present balance.

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