Cambridge Study: US Hosts ~31% of Ethereum Nodes, Over 1/3 Offline Nodes Could Impact Finality

Odaily reported that a new study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance shows 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.

The study's lead, Alexander Neumuller, stated that while node distribution is currently not concentrated in any single country, it relies heavily on a few cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH. Notably, the Ethereum network does not require a majority (50%) of validators to go offline to face issues; if more than one-third of validators are simultaneously offline, the network may fail to achieve block checkpoint finalization. Neumuller pointed out that nodes and validators do not have a one-to-one correspondence, as a single node can run multiple validators. Therefore, it is impossible to accurately determine the actual impact of a node or provider failure on the validator network.

Additionally, the study reassessed energy consumption after the Ethereum merge (The Merge). Data shows that Ethereum's current annual energy consumption is approximately 7.9 GWh, equivalent to about 1 MW of continuous power. This represents only about 0.02% of pre-merge levels, a reduction of approximately 99.98%. Currently, the proportion of sustainable energy used by the Ethereum network exceeds 56%, higher than the global average.

The study also noted that client software centralization is a potential risk; if a dominant client were to have a vulnerability, it could affect a large number of network participants. The report was released by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, with support from the Ethereum Foundation.