Most of Ethereum’s 4,653 active nodes are held by centralized web providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), which could “expose Ethereum to central points of failure”according to cryptocurrency analytics platform Messari.
A Monday post sample that three large cloud providers represent 69% of the nodes hosted on the Ethereum mainnet, of which more than 50% come from Amazon Web Services (AWS), more than 15% from Hetzner and 4.1% from OVH.
Figures from Ethernodes show that Oracle (4.1%), Alibaba (3.9%) and Google (3.5%) also offer web hosting services on Ethereum.
While the distribution of cloud service providers becomes more decentralized among the bottom third of providers, Messari raised concerns in a December 2020 report that the high-cost nature of node infrastructure may leave Ethereum vulnerable.:
“The high costs to run the infrastructure make it more likely that nodes will 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 occupying 42% of the nodes hosted on the Solana network, followed by OVH (26%) and AWS (3%)..
Additionally, Ethernode data also shows that nodes are most geographically concentrated in the United States (46.4%) and Germany (13.4%), accounting for almost 60% of distributed Ethereum nodes worldwide. Therefore, the intervention of the government of one of these two countries could seriously affect the decentralization of Ethereum at the node level..
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