Cambridge Research: The US Hosts Approximately 31% of Ethereum Nodes, Over One-Third Offline Could Impact Finalization

According to the latest research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, approximately 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, with another 39% distributed across EU countries excluding the UK. This shows that the geographic distribution of Ethereum nodes remains relatively concentrated in Western countries.

Research lead Alexander Neumuller stated that while node distribution is not currently concentrated in a single country, it is heavily reliant on a few cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH. It is noteworthy that the Ethereum network does not require half of its validators to fail before problems arise; when more than one-third of validators go offline simultaneously, the network may be unable to finalize block checkpoints. 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 node or provider failure on the validator network.

Furthermore, the study reassessed the energy consumption situation following The Merge. Data indicates that Ethereum's current annual energy consumption is approximately 7.9 GWh, equivalent to a continuous power draw of about 1 MW. This represents 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 research also noted that client software concentration is a potential risk; if a dominant client experiences 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.