Cambridge study: US hosts ~31% of Ethereum nodes; over 1/3 offline could impact finalization

Odaily Planet Daily News According to the latest research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, approximately 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, and about another 39% is distributed across EU countries (excluding the UK), indicating that the geographical distribution of Ethereum nodes remains relatively concentrated in Western countries.

Research lead Alexander Neumuller stated that currently, node distribution is not concentrated in a single country, but it heavily relies on a few cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH. Notably, the Ethereum network does not require half of the validators to fail for problems to arise. When more than one-third of validators are offline simultaneously, the network may be unable to finalize block checkpoints (finalization). Neumuller pointed out that there is no one-to-one correspondence between nodes and validators; a single node may run multiple validators. Therefore, it is currently impossible to precisely determine the actual impact of a specific node or service provider failure on the validator network.

Additionally, the study reassessed energy consumption after 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 megawatt. This is merely about 0.02% of pre-merge levels, representing an energy consumption reduction of approximately 99.98%. Currently, more than 56% of the energy used by the Ethereum network comes from sustainable sources, higher than the global average.

The study also pointed out that client software concentration is a potential risk. If the dominant client 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)