Centralized cloud servers are used to host 61.6% of Ethereum nodes, with about 25% of all Ethereum nodes managed by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In the course of the study, Chainstack analysts turned to the data from the Ethernodes service, which collects information about Ethereum nodes and associated IP addresses. As of September 20, the Ethereum network consisted of 8,933 nodes. Of these, 38.4% (3,434) were based on their own user infrastructure, while the rest of them indicated that they belonged to cloud servers, with 57.3% of all Ethereum nodes belonging to 10 services from this group, including AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean and Hetzner.
Geographically, the distribution has also been very limited, with 34% of Ethereum cloud nodes in the US. In addition, a quarter to half of the AWS nodes are serviced by the Infura service, which is used by most Ethereum applications to optimize performance and is also problematic due to increased centralization.
Previously, there were service interruptions in several cryptocurrency exchanges that were actively using AWS in their operations due to cloud services issues.