3 cloud providers accounting for over two-thirds of Ethereum nodes: Data

Ethereum

The majority of 4,653 active Ethereum nodes are in the hands of centralized web providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), which could “expose Ethereum to central points of failure,” according to crypto analytics platform Messari.

A Monday post shows that three major cloud providers account for 69% of hosted nodes on the Ethereum Mainnet, with over 50% of that coming from Amazon Web Services (AWS), over 15% from Hetzner and 4.1% from OVH.

Figures from Ethernodes additionally show that Oracle (4.1%), Alibaba (3.9%) and Google (3.5%) also provide web hosting services on Ethereum.

While the distribution of cloud service providers becomes more decentralized among the bottom third of providers, Messari pressed the concern in a December 2020 report that the high-cost nature of node infrastructure may leave Ethereum vulnerable:

“High costs to run infrastructure make it more likely that nodes would run infrastructure with cloud computing providers (i.e AWS) – making Ethereum more exposed to central points of failure.”

Node distribution issues experienced by Solana are much the same, with Hetzner taking up 42% of hosted nodes on the Solana network, followed by OVH (26%) and AWS (3%).

Related: Decentralized storage providers power the Web3 economy, but adoption still underway

Furthermore, Ethernode data also shows that nodes are most geographically concentrated in the United States (46.4%) and Germany (13.4%), accounting for nearly 60% of distributed Ethereum nodes worldwide. As such, government intervention from one of these two countries could severely impact Ethereum’s decentralization at the node level.

Articles You May Like

Markets rethink Fed rate cuts as Bitcoin circles $44K on US jobs data
Judge accepts Binance CEO CZ’s guilty plea, with sentencing in Feb
Hashdex tips spot Bitcoin ETFs to trade by Q2, followed by Ethereum
US senators drill into FTC’s work to track AI attacks on older citizens
Bitcoin bulls charge to $44K as week-to-date BTC price gains pass 10%