A few weeks remain before Ethereum transitions from its current proof-of-work (PoW) mining consensus to a proof-of-stake (PoS) one. The change, which is called the Merge, is set to happen on September 15, but the centralization of Ethereum nodes has become a hot topic in the weeks leading up to the big update.
As revealed by Cointelegraph last week, the bulk of the 4,653 current Ethereum nodes are operated by centralised web service companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), which experts feel might expose the Ethereum blockchain to a single point of failure after Merge.
Web service providers distribute nodes for Ethereum. Ethernodes is the source for this information.
Maggie Love, co-founder of the Web3 infrastructure company W3BCloud, had the same concerns. She claimed that the concentration of Ethereum PoS network nodes might become a major issue that nobody seems to be addressing.
Péter Szilágyi, the principal developer of Ethereum, addressed the growing centralization concerns and stated that, since Devcon IV, the team has been attempting to prune the database. Pruning is the process of lowering the size of a blockchain to a point where developers may establish a registry of a specific size that is stable.
Szilágyi said that the concept attracted significant opposition at the time, and the current concentration of nodes is a direct result of this. So that people can run their own nodes, he said, the Ethereum state must always be the same size.
ETH transfers assets to exchanges prior to Merge.
The Ethereum state is a massive data structure that contains not just all accounts and balances, but also a machine state that may vary from block to block based on predefined rules. Szilágyi explained.
“Ethereum state size must be ‘constant.’ Thus, it will run eternally. If necessary, the constant can be increased like the block gas limit, but it must not expand unconstrained. There is no light at the end of the tunnel unless this problem is resolved.
Several parties are making active attempts to remedy the issue, but in the meanwhile, the general public cannot be faulted for “not wishing to maintain an ever-growing “infrastructure” for hosting a node.”
As noted in research by the crypto-analytics business Mesari, the cost of operating a single node is quite expensive. People frequently resort to AWS and other cloud infrastructure service providers due to the high cost of infrastructure. Long-term, however, great centralization might prove to be a weakness.
