A new study from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance found that about 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, while roughly 39% is distributed across the European Union excluding the U.K. The findings indicate that Ethereum’s node geography remains concentrated in Western countries.
Lead researcher Alexander Neumuller said node distribution is not concentrated in any single country. Even so, the network depends heavily on a small number of cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon Web Services and OVH.
Node distribution and network resilience
The report said Ethereum does not need half of its validators to fail before the network runs into trouble. If more than one-third of validators go offline at the same time, the chain may be unable to complete checkpoint finalization.
Neumuller added that nodes and validators do not map one-to-one. A single node can run multiple validators, which means it is still not possible to precisely determine the real impact that an outage at a specific node or service provider would have on the validator network.
Fresh estimate of post-Merge energy use
The research also revisited Ethereum’s energy consumption after The Merge. It estimated current annual energy use at about 7.9 GWh, equivalent to around 1 megawatt of continuous power. That is about 0.02% of the pre-Merge level, implying a drop of roughly 99.98%.
According to the report, more than 56% of the Ethereum network’s energy mix now comes from sustainable sources, above the global average.
Client concentration remains a risk
Beyond geography and cloud dependence, the study said concentration in client software is another potential vulnerability. A bug in a dominant client could affect a large share of network participants.
The report was released by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance with support from the Ethereum Foundation.