Half of Ethereum’s nodes are between the United States, China, and Germany. Vitalik Buterin himself has said that a node does not run on Ethereum.
Most of Ethereum’s nodes are in cloud hosting services. In other words, they are hosted on third-party servers, so they are not under the control of their respective users.
A total of 6,043 nodes, around 67% of the current assets on the network, are hosted on these services. Only 2,452 (27%) are located in residences, according to data from ethernodes.org.
More than half of the nodes currently used in cloud hosting services are at just two providers: Amazon and Alibaba. In other words, if the services of these two providers were at risk or stopped working, a third of Ethereum’s nodes would go down.
As most of the nodes are in the aforementioned hosting services, it is possible to see that more than 40% of the nodes on the network are between the United States of America and China. When adding those that are in Germany, more than 50% are between the three countries.
Few Ethereum nodes are in Latin America, according to Ethernodes. Brazil, the country in the region with most of these nodes, barely has 23 (0.26% of the total). Venezuela (10), Mexico (7), Argentina (7), and Colombia (4) follow the South American giant.
Meanwhile, geth remains as the main Ethereum client with almost 80% of the nodes. Another 10% corresponds to Parity, which reported last December a possible attack that was preventing its synchronization after the Muir Glacier hard fork.
The fact that Vitalik Buterin himself, founder of the project, has acknowledged not running an Ethereum node adds to the fact that 2 thirds of the nodes depend on a service that third parties provide.
This situation in which the founder of the project does not run his node can be an example of the difficulty and cost of running a full node on Ethereum. Buterin referred to the nodes that keep Ethereum’s entire history as “big and scary.” In a few words, the complete blockchain record already weighs about 5 TB.
Ether Supply and Unsynchronized Nodes
Ethernodes shows that almost 27% of Ethereum’s nodes are currently unsynchronized. In both those hosted on the cloud and those in residences, there are more than 1,000 nodes without synchronization.
The most recent controversy regarding Ethereum has revolved around the supply of its native cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH). Buterin himself said that he did not know the total ETH in circulation.
In addition to the number of unsynchronized nodes, it is generally difficult to accurately track the issuance of ETH, according to renowned ecosystem educator Andreas Antonopoulos.
The author of the book Mastering Ethereum belittled the fact referring to the speed of block creation on Ethereum, which is much higher than on Bitcoin.
Antonopoulos also mentioned “uncle blocks”, in charge of rewarding miners that came very close to generating a block. Given that “not all nodes see the uncles at the same time,” the user gets a different picture of the ETH supply in each case, according to the expert.
By Alexander Salazar
