Svmuu News: According to the latest research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, approximately 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, while another 39% is distributed across the European Union (excluding the United Kingdom), indicating that the geographic distribution of Ethereum nodes remains relatively concentrated in Western countries.
Alexander Neumuller, the lead researcher, noted that while node distribution is not currently concentrated in a single country, it relies heavily on a small number of cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon, AWS, and OVH.It is worth noting that the Ethereum network does not require half of the validators to fail before issues arise; if 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 there is no one-to-one correspondence between nodes and validators; a single node may run multiple validators. Therefore, it is currently impossible to precisely determine the actual impact of a failure at a specific node or service provider on the validation network.
In addition, the study reassessed energy consumption following the Ethereum Merge.Data shows that Ethereum’s current annual energy consumption is approximately 7.9 GWh, equivalent to about 1 megawatt of continuous power—only about 0.02% of pre-Merge levels, representing a reduction of approximately 99.98%. Currently, the Ethereum network uses sustainable energy for more than 56% of its power needs, which is higher than the global average.
The study also points out that client software centralization is another potential risk; if a vulnerability were to arise in a dominant client, it could affect a large number of network participants. The report was published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and supported by the Ethereum Foundation. (The)