Cambridge Study: The US Hosts 31% of Ethereum Nodes, Over One-Third Offline Affects Confirmation

The latest research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance shows that approximately 31% of Ethereum nodes are located in the United States, with 39% distributed across the EU excluding the UK, indicating that the geographical distribution of Ethereum nodes is concentrated in Western countries. Alexander Neumuller, the head of the research, pointed out that the node distribution is not concentrated in a single country but relies on a few cloud service providers such as Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH. The Ethereum network may fail to complete block checkpoint final confirmations when more than one-third of validators are offline. Nodes and validators do not correspond one-to-one; a single node may run multiple validators, making it impossible to accurately assess the impact of a node failure on the network. Additionally, the study evaluated the energy consumption of Ethereum post-merge, showing that the current annual energy consumption is about 7.9 GWh, equivalent to approximately 1 megawatt of continuous power, which is only 0.02% of the pre-merge level, representing a decrease of about 99.98%. The proportion of sustainable energy used by the Ethereum network exceeds 56%, higher than the global average. The report also notes that the concentration of client software poses a potential risk, as vulnerabilities in dominant clients could affect a large number of network participants.

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