Cambridge Research: The U.S. hosts about 31% of Ethereum nodes; more than one-third of nodes are offline or may affect final confirmations

Cointelegraph reported that on July 17, the latest research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge showed that about 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, while another about 39% is distributed across EU regions that do not include the United Kingdom, indicating that Ethereum node geographic distribution remains fairly concentrated in Western countries. Alexander Neumuller, the head of the research, said that node distribution is not currently concentrated in a single country, but instead largely relies on a small number of cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH.

Of note, the Ethereum network does not require half of validators to go offline before problems occur. When more than one third of validators are offline at the same time, the network may be unable to complete block checkpoint finalization. Neumuller pointed out that nodes and validators are not in a one-to-one relationship; multiple validators may be run behind a single node, so it is currently not possible to precisely determine the actual impact of a particular node or provider failure on the validation network. In addition, the study also re-evaluated the energy consumption after Ethereum’s The Merge.

Data show that Ethereum’s current annual energy consumption is about 7.9 GWh, equivalent to roughly 1 megawatt of continuous power, only about 0.02% of the pre-Merge level, with energy consumption down by about 99.98%. The proportion of sustainable energy used by the Ethereum network is currently above 56%, higher than the global average. The report also notes that software client concentration is another potential risk—if a vulnerability appears in the dominant client, it could affect many network participants. The report was published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, with support from the Ethereum Foundation.