Justin Bons, chief investment officer (CIO) and founder of Cyber Capital, one of the oldest crypto funds in Europe, is convinced ethereum is the most “robust” network, considering its level of client diversity.
Bons pointed to the distribution of full nodes among several ethereum clients as evidence of the network’s “unparalleled” level of decentralization. The expert believes that decentralization is often overlooked in cryptocurrencies, but ethereum sets “the bar high.”
Customer Diversity: Impact on Security and Reliability
Bons compared the number of customers on ethereum and the dominance of the bitcoin core on bitcoin. Although bitcoin and ethereum are legacy blockchains, the approach taken by developers to leverage customers is evident.
Customer diversity is critical as it can show the extent to which full node operators prefer a given customer lane over another. ethereum, like bitcoin and other public chains, is decentralized and relies on a community of validators to keep the network secure.
Validators, or bitcoin miners, operate full nodes to maintain network operations. However, the blockchain is broken without a client. A client is software that implements the public network specification, enabling secure and effective peer-to-peer (P2P) communication between nodes.
Customer diversity is important for the security and resilience of public networks. As an example, if all node operators were using the same client or software implementation, an error could cause a network outage or even other disruptions. With more clients, it is more difficult to stop network operations even if there is an error, which improves reliability.
Improved reliability due to customer diversity and distribution also means greater security. An attacker wishing to disrupt operations must disable all available clients used by node operators before continuing.
ethereum Versus bitcoin Full Node Distribution
As of September 25, there were several ethereum clients, including Geth, Besu, Erigon, and Nethermind. However, more than half of all ethereum full node operators prefer Geth, which has a 55.35% market share. Other popular options are Nethermind and Erigon, with a share of 23.48% and 12.03%, respectively.
Of all the nodes in operation, more than 74% have synced with the ethereum network, while around 26% are still syncing.
If the total concentration of nodes is analyzed, the majority are operated from the United States, with more than 43%, and a higher percentage from Germany, approximately 13%. There is a small concentration of ethereum full nodes from the UK, Singapore and France.
On the other hand, bitcoin full node operators mostly exclusively depend at the core of bitcoin. According to statistics, 16,681 nodes are mainly distributed globally. There is no country from which more than 10% of bitcoin full nodes are operated.
Featured image from Canva, TradingView chart
