Just like the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, Ethereum is also often pitched as self-sovereign money network capable of operating independently beyond regulators or the reach of financial institutions.
But for Ethereum this may not be the case, as a research suggests that the blockchain-based distributed computing platform is actually centralized, as most of it runs in the cloud.
To be exact, 61.6% of all Ethereum ETH nodes are not self-sovereign.
And among those hosted in the cloud, most of them are on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
According to reports cloud services provider Chainstack through data shared with The Next Web, Amazon indirectly operates nearly 25% of all Ethereum nodes.
As of September 20, 2019, Chainstack analysts found that the Ethereum network was comprised of 8,933 nodes.
Just 38.4% (3,434) of those nodes were hosted fully independently (self-sovereign), and 61.6 percent (5,499) of the network was running in the cloud. And 57.3% of all Ethereum nodes that are hosted in the servers of top 10 cloud hosting providers, most of them (2,195 nodes) are on AWS.
After AWS, others like Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner were also hosting a big chunk of the network.
What makes it concerning is that, the cloud nodes aren't really distributed evenly around the world, with Chainstack determining that 34% of all Ethereum‘s cloud nodes were hosted in the United States.
In other words, if ever Jeff Bezos wanted to, he could technically turn off Ethereum on Amazon's part, literally crippling 25% of the blockchain network. And if ever other cloud providers join the crowd, more than half of Ethereum can go dark overnight.
One of the example was back in November 2018. At that time, major cryptocurrency exchanges were forced offline after AWS suffered service interruptions across South Korea. Then in a more recent time, a large number of cryptocurrency exchanges had troubles with erratic market data due to AWS failures. Binance reported problems with withdrawals as a result.
The research managed to find this, by mapping Ethereum's problem with the cloud.
This is possible due to the “Ethereum discovery protocol,” the mechanism nodes use to find each other and join the network. The process includes forcing all nodes to maintain a list of other nodes in the network over the past 24 hours.
Using this method, Chainstalk was able to pull data from ethernodes.org, a third-party blockchain explorer that runs its own nodes. This gave the firm a complete list of Ethereum nodes and their IP addresses.
Because all internet routing services (such as cloud providers) can be identified by their unique Autonomous System Number (ASN), with every IP address can be mapped to an ASN, Chainstalk was able to cross-reference the IP addresses of nodes against a maintained list of ASNs, using a lookup tool.
Matching them with those operated by known cloud hosting providers, the firm can see which of the nodes were hosted by what company, and how many weren't hosted by any third-party.
This finding here by Chainstalk, can be considered a bad news for blockchain, a technology that supposed to make things decentralized.
