Cambridge study: 31% of Ethereum nodes are located in the United States; more than one-third of nodes are offline or impacting the network’s final transaction confirmation

PANews July 17 news: According to a report by The Block, a new study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge shows that Ethereum node activity has a certain degree of geographic concentration. The United States accounts for about 31% of global Ethereum node activity, while the European Union (excluding the UK) accounts for about 39%.

The study’s lead researcher, Alexander Neumüller, said that node distribution is currently mainly concentrated in Western regions, but it is not highly concentrated in any single country. However, concentration among node hosting service providers is still worth paying attention to. A large number of nodes are currently run on a small number of cloud service providers such as Hetzner, AWS, and OVH.

The study points out that the Ethereum network does not need half of the validators to fail before serious impacts occur. When more than about one-third of validators go offline at the same time, the network’s checkpoints will be unable to complete finalization, which may impede the consensus process.

Neumüller emphasized that nodes and validators are not a one-to-one relationship. Outsiders cannot accurately determine how many validators are operating behind a single node, so the actual risk needs to be further assessed. Geographic concentration has also prompted regulatory discussions. In 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) cited the situation that many Ethereum nodes are located in the United States as one of the bases for its discussion of whether it has regulatory jurisdiction over Ethereum transactions.

In addition, the Cambridge study also re-evaluated Ethereum’s energy consumption after “The Merge.” The data show that Ethereum’s current annual electricity consumption is about 7.9 GWh, with a continuous power draw of about 1 MW, which is down about 99.98% compared with before The Merge. The proportion of the network’s sustainably sourced energy use is currently over 56%. Besides the geographic distribution of nodes, concentration of client software is also a potential source of risk. If a vulnerability appears in a mainstream client, it could affect a large number of network participants. The Ethereum Foundation supported the study to help further assess how the post-Merge network is operating.