Cambridge study: The US hosts about 31% of Ethereum nodes; more than one-third of nodes are offline or could affect final confirmations

Golden Finance 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, with another about 39% distributed across EU regions that do not include the UK, indicating that Ethereum node geographic distribution remains relatively concentrated in Western countries. The study’s lead, Alexander Neumuller, said that node distribution is not currently concentrated in a single country, but rather relies mainly on a small number of cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH, among others.

Worth noting is that problems in the Ethereum network do not require half of validators to go offline; when more than one third of validators are simultaneously offline, the network may be unable to complete block checkpoint finalization. Neumuller pointed out that nodes and validators are not a one-to-one correspondence—multiple validators may be run behind a single node—so it is currently not possible to precisely judge the real impact of a given node or service provider failure on the validation network. In addition, the research also re-evaluated Ethereum’s energy consumption after The Merge. Data shows that Ethereum’s current annual energy consumption is about 7.9 GWh, equivalent to a continuous power of about 1 megawatt, only about 0.02% of the pre-Merge level, with energy consumption down by about 99.98%. At present, the proportion of the Ethereum network’s use of sustainable energy exceeds 56%, higher than the global average. The report also notes that client software concentration is another potential risk—if a vulnerability affects a dominant client, it could impact a large number of network participants. The report was released by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, with support from the Ethereum Foundation.