Cambridge study: US hosts approximately 31% of Ethereum nodes; over one-third of nodes offline could affect finalization

Odaily reported that a new study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance reveals 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 a single country, it relies heavily on a few cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH. Notably, the Ethereum network does not require half of its validators to fail for issues to arise; when over one-third of validators are simultaneously offline, the network may be unable to complete 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 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 following The Merge. Data shows that Ethereum's current annual energy consumption is approximately 7.9 GWh, equivalent to about 1 MW of continuous power, representing 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 concentration is a potential risk; if the 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, with support from the Ethereum Foundation. (The)