Study: U.S. Hosts 31% of Ethereum Nodes; Over 1/3 Validator Offline Could Halt Network Finality

According to the latest research from Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, approximately 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, with about 39% distributed across EU regions excluding the UK, indicating geographic concentration among Western countries. Researcher Alexander Neumuller noted that while nodes are not concentrated in a single country, they heavily rely on a few cloud service providers including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH. Critically, when over one-third of validators go offline simultaneously, the Ethereum network may fail to complete block checkpoint finalization.

The study also found that Ethereum's energy consumption since the Merge has decreased by 99.98%, to approximately 7.9 GWh annually equivalent to about 1 megawatt continuous power. Currently, over 56% of the network uses sustainable energy, exceeding global averages. The report was released by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance with support from the Ethereum Foundation.