One third of the nodes are in the United States—this concentration is higher than I expected. We need to keep a close eye on client diversity.

A new study from the Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge shows that the United States accounts for nearly one third of Ethereum node activity. The European Union (excluding the UK) is about 39%. Overall, node distribution is mainly concentrated across North America and Europe, but it is not focused in a single country. Nodes are primarily hosted by cloud service providers such as Hetzner, AWS, and OVH. Study lead Alexander Neumuller said that if more than one third of validators go offline at the same time, Ethereum checkpoints will stop final confirmation. The network should remain geographically distributed, and concentrating client software also poses risks—if a leading client has a vulnerability, it could affect the entire network. The study also re-evaluated Ethereum’s energy consumption after the Merge, estimating current annual electricity usage at about 7.9 GWh, down roughly 99.98% from before the Merge. The share of sustainable energy use exceeds 56%. (The Block)