[Cambridge Study: Approximately 31% of Ethereum Nodes Are in the U.S., Over One-Third of Nodes Going Offline Could Impact Finalization] Odaily Planet Daily News – A recent study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance reveals that approximately 31% of active Ethereum nodes are located in the United States, with another 39% distributed across the European Union (excluding the UK), indicating that the geographical distribution of Ethereum nodes remains relatively concentrated in Western countries. Alexander Neumuller, the lead researcher, stated that while node distribution is not concentrated in a single country, it heavily relies on a few cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH. Notably, the Ethereum network does not require half of its validators to fail to encounter issues; if more than one-third of validators go offline simultaneously, the network may fail to finalize block checkpoints. Neumuller pointed out that nodes and validators do not have a one-to-one correspondence, as a single node may run multiple validators. Therefore, it is currently impossible to precisely determine the actual impact of a failure in a specific node or service provider on the validation network. Additionally, the study reassessed Ethereum's energy consumption following The Merge. Data shows that Ethereum's current annual energy consumption is approximately 7.9 GWh, equivalent to about 1 MW of continuous power, which is only about 0.02% of pre-Merge levels—a reduction of approximately 99.98% in energy consumption. Currently, over 56% of the energy used by the Ethereum network comes from sustainable sources, exceeding the global average. The study also highlighted that the concentration of client software poses another potential risk. If a dominant client were to have a vulnerability, it could impact a significant number of network participants. This report was published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance with support from the Ethereum Foundation.