Cambridge Research: 31% of Ethereum nodes are active in the United States, and one-third of the nodes going offline can disrupt the network's finality

According to The Block, the latest report "Merged Ethereum" released by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) shows that approximately 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, and 39% is distributed across the European Union (excluding the UK), presenting an overall Western centralization pattern.

The report points out that there are potential centralization risks in the Ethereum network—nodes are highly concentrated among three major hosting service providers: Hetzner, AWS, and OVH. If more than one-third of the validators go offline simultaneously, the network checkpoints will stop finalizing.

In addition, the report recalculated Ethereum's energy consumption, estimating that the annual electricity usage after the merge is about 7.9 gigawatt-hours, a decrease of approximately 99.98% compared to before the merge, with sustainable energy accounting for over 56%. The cost needed to offset its annual carbon emissions is only about $33,500 to $73,800.