Ethereum Node Fun Facts: The execution layer has the most nodes in Henan, and China United Network Communications has built half of its nodes.

The distribution of Ethereum nodes shows a diversified development, and besides China and the United States, Germany has become the third largest gathering place for Ethereum node IPs. (Background: The DeFi father is starting the Ethereum Foundation! Andre Cronje: Where is the money going? Even replies and retweets are lazy?) (Supplementary background: Ethereum faced criticism as 'Vitalik praises Polygon' to put out the fire: significant contributions to ZK, not just boring finance) Unknowingly, the total staking amount of Ethereum has reached around 35 million (there may be some differences among various data statistics websites). This number rose from 15 million to 25 million in about a year, 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 dynamic balance period of staking and unstaking after reaching a certain limit. The chart above comes from the open-source browser beaconcha.in developed by BitFly, which was once the largest Ethereum PoW mining pool EtherMine. This Ethereum ecosystem development company based in Austria has developed multiple browsers, among which ethernodes.org is a data website related to the information of Ethereum execution layer and consensus layer nodes. The data cited earlier about Ethereum nodes being largely hosted on AWS is from that website. Two years ago, over 60% of the hosted nodes were based on AWS. As of today, both the distribution of nodes and the cloud service providers used have changed significantly. (All data below is as of the time of writing and excludes unsynchronized nodes) What clients are the nodes using? Among the 10,475 execution layer nodes in the statistics, Geth accounts for 51.66%, which still poses a problem of excessive proportion. 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. Originally developed by ConsenSys, the client Besu, which later migrated to the Hyperledger Foundation's GitHub repository in 2019, accounts for 8.26%. Erigon, originally one of the four major execution layer clients of Ethereum (led by British developer Alexey Akhunov, originally named Turbo-Geth, renamed Erigon in May 2021), has a share of 6.1%, having been surpassed by Reth launched by Paradigm (with a share of 6.89%). Reth has always been controversial in the Ethereum community, with Yearn core developer Banteg stating that Reth extensively borrows from Akula (a Rust-implemented client) and replicates the Erigon architecture, but Paradigm has not supported these developers. Although Paradigm's CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos responded that Reth 'stands on the shoulders of giants', the community did not buy it, believing it to be a VC-style resource plundering. This incident also led the Akula developers to announce they would no longer maintain the project, believing they could not compete with Paradigm. Just a week ago, Ethereum core developer Federico Carrone also warned on X that as a for-profit company, Paradigm's expansion (such as hiring key researchers, funding open-source libraries, leading EIPs, and Reth) poses a threat to Ethereum's decentralization, but its leading Ethrex accounts for only 0.2% of execution layer clients. As for the consensus layer clients, among the 8,597 consensus layer nodes in the statistics, the highest proportion is Lighthouse, founded and continuously maintained by Australian security company Sigma Prime, reaching 45.66%. Prysm, which accounts for about 24%, was originally developed and maintained by blockchain infrastructure company Prysmatic Labs, which was acquired by Arbitrum development company Offchain Labs in 2022. The third-ranked Teku accounts for 11.91% and comes from the same development team as Besu. Nimbus, with a 10.19% share, is a team that solely relies on funding from the Ethereum Foundation and others, aiming to improve resource efficiency so that node operators can easily run Ethereum client software on resource-constrained devices (such as mobile phones and laptops). In the Ethereum network, the 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 degree of centralization two or three years ago, the Ethereum Foundation's efforts to promote client diversification have had some effect. Where are the nodes located? The locations of Ethereum execution layer nodes and consensus layer nodes are very difficult to accurately identify, and the website likely determines the locations through IP analysis, which may not be very precise but gives a rough outline of the distribution. Among the nodes running execution layer clients, over 30% of IPs are located in the United States, with the densest distribution near Washington, D.C. Additionally, cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York also have some distribution, while the remaining nodes are scattered across Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, and other states. As for Europe, data shows that Germany accounts for 13.13%, the UK 4.47%, France 4.28%, and Finland 3.78%. Looking at the map, nodes are primarily distributed in the core cities of various countries, including Dublin in Ireland, Paris in France, Frankfurt in Germany, and Halmstad in Finland. The proportion of nodes located in China is less than 4%, but they are widely distributed, from Changchun in Jilin Province in the north to Hainan in the south, from Xining in Qinghai Province in the west to the coastal areas of Shanghai and Taiwan in the east. It is worth mentioning that, based on IP addresses, there are 103 nodes in Hong Kong, 97 in Taiwan, while other regions in China only have a total of 204 nodes. The most concentrated distribution is in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, represented by the darkest color on the map below. The distribution of consensus layer client nodes in North America and Europe is basically similar to that of execution layer client nodes. As for China, although there are still dozens of nodes in the data, there is no significant display on the map. In terms of regional distribution, the US and Germany rank first and second in both execution layer and consensus layer nodes, but Ethereum nodes exist almost everywhere around the world, including small countries like Guatemala, Kuwait, Montenegro, and even Iceland located in the far north. What cloud services are the nodes using? 'Half of Ethereum nodes are using AWS' is also a well-known joke in the industry. A few years ago, Ethereum indeed had a large number of nodes hosted on cloud services, but this situation has greatly improved now. Among the nodes running execution layer clients, hosting accounts for 49.1%, and self-built accounts for 45%; for consensus layer client nodes, possibly due to considerations of requiring stability to prevent penalties, hosting accounts for 58.5%, but self-built nodes are closely behind at 37.5%. In addition to the nature of the nodes, there are…