Odaily Frontline | A quarter of the nodes are managed by AWS, is Ethereum really decentralized?
This article comes fromThe Next Web, original author: David Canellis
Odaily Translator |
Odaily Translator |
Blockchains like Ethereum are often positioned as autonomous monetary networks that operate independently of countries, financial institutions, and corporations. But recent research suggests that may not be the case.
Cloud services provider Chainstack reported that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud service, indirectly operates nearly 25% of Ethereum nodes, which is indeed disturbing.
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Cloud Services Map Out Ethereum's Problems
Analyzing the Ethereum network in this way is possible thanks to the "Ethereum discovery protocol" - a mechanism for nodes to find each other and join the network.
This process essentially forces all nodes to maintain a list of other nodes in the network for the past 24 hours.
So, to find out who the Ethereum nodes are, Chainstack pulled data from ethernodes.org (a third-party blockchain explorer that runs its own nodes) and obtained a complete list of Ethereum nodes and their IP addresses.
All Internet routing services (such as cloud providers) can now be identified by their unique "Autonomous System Number" (ASN), and each IP address can be mapped to an ASN.
Odaily Note: In the Internet, an autonomous system (English: Autonomous system, AS) refers to the entirety of all IP networks and routers under the jurisdiction of one (sometimes multiple) entities, which implement a common routing strategy for the Internet.
This way, analysts can easily see which nodes are hosted by which company, and how many nodes are not hosted by any third party at all.
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Top 10 Centralized Services for Hosting Ethereum Nodes
As of September 20, 2019, Chainstack analysts determined that the Ethereum network consists of 8,933 nodes.
Only 38.4% (3434) of these are fully independently (self-)hosted, while 61.6% (5499) of the network is running on the cloud.
To make matters worse, the top ten cloud hosting providers account for 57.3% of all Ethereum nodes, with AWS hosting far more than any other provider.
There is a more serious problem: these cloud nodes are not evenly distributed around the world. Chainstack determined that 34% of Ethereum’s cloud nodes are hosted in the United States.
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Can AWS, which hosts nearly a quarter of Ethereum's nodes, be trusted?
We can boldly assume that, for unknown reasons, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos suddenly attacked Ethereum, or imagine that AWS is about to release its own blockchain and provide a matching cryptocurrency.
In this case, technically speaking, 25% of the network hosted by AWS could suddenly crash and damage the efficiency of the network, eventually dealing a serious blow to the price of Ethereum.
This is obviously bad news for a blockchain that is supposed to be decentralized.
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The wider cryptocurrency ecosystem has similar problems
Ethereum isn’t the only company openly relying on centralized cloud hosting services. In November last year, major local exchanges Upbit and Coinone were forced to go offline as AWS suffered service outages across South Korea.
Just recently, due to the failure of the cache server in the AWS Japan computer room, a large number of cryptocurrency exchanges have experienced unstable market data. Binance also reported withdrawal issues resulting from this at the time.
Nonetheless, this research shows that, in addition to Infura, the backbone of the vast majority of ethereum applications, the ethereum network relies on centralized services.
Interestingly, Chainstack CTO Eugune Aseev revealed that he estimates that between a quarter and a half of the Ethereum cloud nodes running on AWS are run by Infura.
