Cambridge study finds 31% of Ethereum nodes in US, raising stall risk

Cambridge research puts 31% of Ethereum node activity in the US, where a third of validators going offline at once could stall network finalization.

"Geographical distribution is something desirable for a network," Alexander Neumuller, research lead at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, said in an interview. The distribution is Western-centric without being concentrated in any single country, he said.

Nodes cluster around three hosting providers — Hetzner, AWS and OVH — Neumuller said, flagging that Ethereum does not require half its validators to fail to cause a live network disruption. Once more than a third go dark at once, checkpoints stop finalizing, he said, citing the research. The relationship between nodes and validators is not one-to-one, and no one knows precisely how many validators run behind any given node. Hetzner's terms of service at one point barred running blockchain nodes, though Neumuller said that may have since changed.

Concentration carries jurisdictional weight. In 2022, the US Securities and Exchange Commission argued it had jurisdiction over Ethereum because most nodes were hosted in the US, meaning transactions would fall under US securities law. Neumuller called the current distribution healthy as a personal opinion while flagging it as something the community should monitor.

The report, titled "Ethereum After the Merge," reworks the methodology behind Cambridge's earlier energy estimates, incorporating empirical data on how nodes split between residential and commercial hosting rather than theoretical assumptions. Network upgrades after the merge prompted the update, Neumuller said, since software changes can alter how hardware draws power.

Ethereum now consumes about 7.9 gigawatt-hours annually, roughly one megawatt of continuous power, or about 2,000 UK households. That is a drop of about 99.98% against pre-merge levels. Sustainable power usage across the network now exceeds 56%, compared with a global average of 43%.

Offsetting Ethereum's total annual emissions with high-quality nature-based removal credits would cost between £25,000 and £55,000 (about $33,500 to $73,800), Neumuller said, comparing the figure to the price of a car. He named it the finding that surprised him most. The Ethereum Foundation supported the work, he said, thanking the organization for enabling the new estimate.

Client software concentration presents a parallel risk, since a bug in a dominant client can propagate across the network, Neumuller said. The report includes distribution data for both consensus and execution clients. He has not discussed the centralization findings with the foundation directly and characterized its emphasis on decentralization as his own reading of its public communications.

The findings come as Ethereum faces growing scrutiny over its proof-of-stake transition and whether the network's validator set is sufficiently decentralized. Roughly 39% of node activity sits across the European Union excluding the UK, meaning the US and EU together account for about 70% of all Ethereum node activity. That geographic concentration leaves the network exposed to jurisdiction-specific regulatory actions or infrastructure disruptions, Neumuller said.

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