Ethereum is just a few weeks away from the official transition from the current Proof of Work (PoW) to the PoS mining consensus. Officially called a merger, this transition is scheduled for September 15, but in the run-up to the major upgrade, Ethereum node centralization has become a hot topic.
Most of the 4,653 active Ethereum nodes are being powered by centralized web providers like Amazon Web Services, which experts believe could become a central point of failure.
The same concern was expressed by Maggie Love, co-founder of Web3 infrastructure firm W3BCloud. She claimed that the centralization of nodes in the Ethereum PoS network could become a big concern that nobody seems to pay attention to.
Ethereum lead developer Péter Szilágyi has addressed growing concerns about centralization, saying he has been trying to truncate the database since Devcon IV. “Pruning” refers to reducing the size of the blockchain to a point where developers can create a reliable registry with a certain size.
Szilágyi adds that the idea caused quite a stir at the time and the current centralization of contracts is a direct result of it. He explained that the state of Ethereum must be of a fixed size so that people can run their own nodes.
Ethereum status refers to a large-scale data structure that contains not only all accounts and balances, but also device states that change from block to block according to predetermined rules. Szilágyi explains:
“Ethereum state needs to be ‘constant‘ in size. That way it can run forever. The constant can be pushed up like the block gas limit if need be, but it mustn’t grow unbounded. Until that’s solved, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.”
He said many parties are actively working to fix the problem, however, in the meantime, the common public shouldn’t be blamed for “not wanting to maintain an ever larger “infrastructure” for running a node.”
Right now, the cost of running a single node is very high, crypto analytics firm Mesari points out in its report. For these infrastructure costs, people often turn to cloud infrastructure service providers like AWS.. However, high centralization could prove to be a vulnerability in the long term.
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