Cambridge Study: US Hosts ~31% of Ethereum Nodes; Over One-Third Nodes Offline Could Impact Finalization

Odaily Odaily A new study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance reveals that approximately 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, with another 39% distributed across EU countries excluding the UK, indicating that the geographic distribution of Ethereum nodes remains relatively concentrated in Western nations.

Lead researcher Alexander Neumuller stated that while node distribution is not currently concentrated in any single country, it is heavily reliant on a few major cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH. Notably, the Ethereum network does not require half of its validators to fail for problems to arise. If more than one-third of validators go offline simultaneously, the network may be unable to finalize block checkpoints (finalization). Neumuller pointed out that nodes and validators do not have a one-to-one correspondence; a single node may run multiple validators. Therefore, it is currently impossible to precisely assess the actual impact on the validator network from the failure of a specific node or service provider.

Furthermore, the study reassessed the energy consumption of Ethereum following The Merge. Data shows that Ethereum's current annual energy consumption is approximately 7.9 GWh, equivalent to a continuous power draw of about 1 MW. This represents only about 0.02% of pre-merge levels, a reduction of approximately 99.98%. Currently, over 56% of the energy used by the Ethereum network comes from sustainable sources, exceeding the global average.

The study also noted that client software diversity is another potential risk. If a dominant client software has a vulnerability, it could affect a large number of network participants. The report was published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and supported by the Ethereum Foundation. (The)