Cambridge Research: The United States hosts about 31% of Ethereum nodes, with over 1/3 of the nodes offline or affecting final confirmation

The latest research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance shows that approximately 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, with about 39% distributed in the EU region excluding the UK, indicating that the geographical distribution of Ethereum nodes is still relatively concentrated in Western countries. The research leader, Alexander Neumuller, stated that the current node distribution is not concentrated in a single country but primarily relies on a few cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH.

It is noteworthy that the Ethereum network does not require half of the validators to fail for issues to arise; when more than one-third of validators go offline simultaneously, the network may be unable to complete the finalization of block checkpoints. Neumuller pointed out that nodes and validators do not have a one-to-one correspondence; a single node may run multiple validators, making it currently impossible to accurately assess the actual impact of a specific node or service provider failure on the validation network. Additionally, the research reassessed the energy consumption situation after Ethereum's Merge. The data shows that Ethereum's current annual energy consumption is approximately 7.9 GWh, equivalent to about 1 megawatt of continuous power, which is only about 0.02% of the pre-Merge level, with energy consumption decreasing by approximately 99.98%. Currently, the proportion of sustainable energy used by the Ethereum network exceeds 56%, higher than the global average. The research also pointed out that the concentration of client software is another potential risk; if a dominant client has a vulnerability, it could affect a large number of network participants. The report was published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, with support from the Ethereum Foundation.