what purpose/function do light clients serve in the network?
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Hi @obsv, the light client doesn’t really serve a purpose in the network.
Light clients are intended to be a tool for blockchain consumers/users to enable secure access to blockchain state without incurring the cost of running a full node.
When you run request data from a light client it actually fetches it from full nodes, but critically it is able to verify the correctness of the data by validating it against the state root of the related block.
An alternative would be to use a hosted service such as https://forno.celo.org/ but in that case there is no built in verification of the correctness of the data returned, you simply have to trust that the operator gave you good data.
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