8.4 World State

The world state is a mapping between addresses (accounts) and account states. The world state is not stored on the blockchain, but the Yellow Paper states it is expected that implementations store this data in a trie (also referred to as the state database or state trie). The world state can be seen as the global state that is constantly updated by transaction executions. All the information about Xiden accounts lives in the world state and is stored in the world state trie. If you want to know the balance of an account, or the current state of a smart contract, you query the world state trie to retrieve the account state of that account. We’ll describe how this data is stored shortly.