According to a study by the Alternative Finance Research Center at the University of Cambridge, approximately 31% of Ethereum nodes are located in the United States, while around 39% are distributed in the European Union and rely on cloud service providers such as Hetzner, Amazon Web Services, and OVH. When more than one-third of validators go offline, the Ethereum network is unable to complete the final confirmation of block checkpoints. The current annual energy consumption of Ethereum is about 7.9 GWh, which is about 0.02% of the pre merger level. Energy consumption has decreased by about 99.98%, and the proportion of sustainable energy use exceeds 56%. In addition, the concentration of client software also poses potential risks. The report was released by the Cambridge Alternative Finance Research Centre with support from the Ethereum Foundation.
