A new study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance shows that the United States accounts for nearly one-third of Ethereum node activity, while the European Union (excluding the UK) is about 39%. Overall, node distribution is mainly concentrated in Europe and North America, but it is not focused on any single country. Nodes are primarily hosted by cloud service providers such as Hetzner, AWS, and OVH. The study’s lead, Alexander Neumuller, said that if more than one-third of validators go offline at the same time, Ethereum checkpoints will stop being finalized. The network should remain geographically distributed, as centralizing client software also poses risks, and vulnerabilities affecting a dominant client could impact the entire network. In addition, the study re-evaluated Ethereum’s energy consumption after the Merge, estimating current annual electricity usage at about 7.9 GWh, down about 99.98% from before the Merge; the share of sustainable energy use exceeds 56%. (The Block)