Hey buddy, does Henan support half of the sky? A deep dive into Ethereum nodes.

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Original author: Eric, Foresight News

Unknowingly, the total staking amount of Ethereum has reached around 35 million coins (there may be some discrepancies among different data statistics websites). This figure took about a year to grow from 15 million to 25 million, but it took twice as long to grow from 25 million to 35 million. It can be anticipated that, over time, the staking amount of Ethereum may enter a period of dynamic balance between staking and unstaking quantities after reaching a certain upper limit.

The image above comes from the open-source browser beaconcha.in launched by BitFly, the developer of the once largest Ethereum PoW mining pool EtherMine. This Ethereum ecosystem development company based in Austria has developed several browsers, among which ethernodes.org is a data site related to information about Ethereum execution layer and consensus layer nodes. The data cited earlier regarding a large number of Ethereum nodes being hosted on AWS comes from this website.

Two years ago, over 60% of the custodial nodes were based on AWS. As of today, both the distribution of nodes and the cloud service providers being used have changed significantly. (All data below is as of the time of writing and excludes unsynchronized nodes.)

What clients do the nodes use?

Among the 10,475 execution layer nodes in the statistics, Geth accounts for 51.66% of the clients used, which still poses a problem of excessively high market share. The client Nethermind, developed under the leadership of the newly appointed Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, Tomasz Stańczak, follows closely with a 26.48% share. The client Besu, originally developed by ConsenSys and later migrated to the Hyperledger Foundation's GitHub repository in 2019, accounts for 8.26%. The client Erigon, which was originally known as Turbo-Geth and led by UK developer Alexey Akhunov, accounts for 6.1% and has been surpassed by Reth, which was launched by Paradigm and has a share of 6.89%.

Reth has always been controversial within the Ethereum community. Yearn core developer Banteg once stated that Reth heavily borrows from Akula (a Rust implementation client) and copies the Erigon architecture; however, Paradigm has not supported these developers. Although Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos responded that Reth “stands on the shoulders of giants”, the community is not convinced and views this as a VC-style resource plundering. This event also led the Akula developers to announce that they would no longer maintain the project because they feel unable to compete with Paradigm.

Just a week ago, Ethereum core developer Federico Carrone also warned on X that the expansion of Paradigm, a profit-oriented company (such as hiring key researchers, funding open source libraries, leading EIPs, and Reth), poses a threat to Ethereum's decentralization. However, its dominant Ethrex accounts for only 0.2% of the execution layer clients.

As for the consensus layer clients, among the 8,597 consensus layer nodes counted, the highest proportion is held by Lighthouse, founded and continuously maintained by the Australian security company Sigma Prime, reaching 45.66%. Approximately 24% of the nodes use Prysm, which was initially developed and maintained by the blockchain infrastructure company Prysmatic Labs, which was acquired by Arbitrum developer Offchain Labs in 2022. The third place, Teku, accounts for 11.91% and is developed by the same team as Besu. Nimbus, with a share of 10.19%, is a team that relies solely on funding from the Ethereum Foundation and others; Nimbus aims to improve resource efficiency, allowing node operators to easily run Ethereum client software on resource-constrained devices such as mobile phones and laptops.

In the Ethereum network, the market shares of the top four execution layer clients and consensus layer clients have reached 93.29% and 91.76% respectively, still showing a strong centralization. However, compared to the more exaggerated levels of centralization two or three years ago, the client diversification efforts promoted by the Ethereum Foundation have had some effect.

Where are the nodes?

The location of the Ethereum execution layer nodes and consensus layer nodes is a very difficult data to accurately identify. This website is likely determining the location through IP analysis, which may not be very accurate, but it does give us a rough outline of the distribution.

Among the nodes running the execution layer client, over 30% of IPs are located in the United States, with the densest distribution near Washington, D.C. Additionally, there are some distributions in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, while the remaining nodes are scattered across states like Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Florida, and Massachusetts.

As for Europe, the data shows that Germany accounts for 13.13%, the UK for 4.47%, France for 4.28%, and Finland for 3.78%. From the map, the nodes are also mainly distributed in the core cities of each country, including Dublin in Ireland, Paris in France, Frankfurt in Germany, and Helsinki in Finland.

The proportion of nodes located in China is less than 4%, but they are widely distributed, from Changchun in Jilin in the north to Hainan in the south, west to Xining in Qinghai Province, and east to the coastal Shanghai and Taiwan. It is worth mentioning that according to IP addresses, the number of nodes in Hong Kong is 103, in Taiwan it is 97, while the total number in other parts of China is only 204. The most concentrated distribution is at the points with the darkest color in the image below, located in Zhengzhou, Henan Province.

As for the distribution of consensus layer client nodes in North America and Europe, it is basically the same as that of execution layer client nodes. In China, although there are still dozens of nodes according to the data, they are not prominently displayed on the map. Regarding regional distribution, the United States and Germany rank first and second in both execution layer and consensus layer nodes. However, Ethereum nodes exist almost all over the world, including small countries such as Guatemala, Kuwait, Montenegro, and even Iceland, located in the far north.

What cloud services are being used by the nodes?

“Half of the Ethereum nodes are hosted on AWS” is considered a famous meme in the industry. A few years ago, it was true that a large number of Ethereum nodes were hosted on cloud services, but this situation has significantly improved now.

The share of hosted nodes in the execution layer client accounts for 49.1%, while self-built nodes account for 45%; the share of hosted nodes in the consensus layer client is 58.5%, possibly due to the need for stability to avoid penalties, but self-built nodes closely follow with 37.5%. In addition to the nature of the nodes, there are many interesting detailed data points in this.

First, for the nodes running the execution layer clients, China Unicom and China Telecom account for a total of 51.52% among the self-built nodes' Internet Service Providers. Additionally, this includes the China Unicom Industrial Internet Backbone Network, China Mobile and the China Education and Research Network Center, China Unicom (Shenzhen), China Telecom Yunnan Province IDC1 Network, China Telecom Group, and Beijing Baidu Netcom Technology Co., Ltd.

It seems that more than 20% of execution layer client nodes are running domestically, but may be using overseas IP addresses. In contrast, very few execution layer client nodes use domestic network operators. Given that operating execution clients does not provide stable income, I speculate that the high proportion is mainly used to meet the needs of RPC nodes, development, on-chain high-frequency trading, or strategy trading where quick transaction broadcasting is required. This is enough to indicate that the domestic market remains an important market for on-chain activities.

As for the data used by the hosted nodes, it is relatively aligned with the regional distribution of various cloud services.

Among the managed execution client nodes, 35.53% chose AWS, 13.75% chose the German hosting provider Hetzner Online, and 9.69% chose the French cloud service provider OVHcloud. Google Cloud (7.02%) and Oracle Cloud (2.37%) ranked fourth and fifth, respectively, which aligns with the regional distribution primarily concentrated in the United States and Europe. The consensus layer client nodes are similar, with the same five service providers occupying the top five positions. Additionally, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei Cloud are also listed, but their market shares are very small.

Based on this calculation, the proportion of nodes hosted on AWS is approximately 20%, which is considered a relatively reasonable ratio.

Overall, there is no dominance of a single entity among the more than 10,000 nodes running execution layer clients and nearly 9,000 nodes running consensus layer clients, whether in terms of geographical distribution or based on network services, hosting service providers, etc. There are some risks associated with a high concentration in client selection, but the proportion of the leading clients is actually gradually decreasing. The dream of Ethereum as a “world computer” is gradually being realized under the foundation's efforts to promote decentralization.