Ethereum Nodes Fall by a Third, Bitcoin Nodes Slightly Rise

[Mercury]

Ethereum nodes have fallen since January with the network now having 2,000 nodes less than six months ago.

We reported at the beginning of the year the highest number of publicly reachable nodes for ethereum was 10,078 on Ethernodes, while Etherscan at the time was counting 7,857 eth nodes.

Now Ethernodes says there are 8,138 reachable nodes, down by about 2,000, with a likewise drop seen for Etherscan which says there are 5,641 nodes.

Ethereum nodes fall, June 2019

Interestingly they’re down by close to 8% just in the past 24 hours, while they’re up over last week by more than 3%. So indicating this might not be just a fluke.

For Ethernodes they say there has been an increase by 7% for the past 24 hours, but they’re down 10% over the month, with this difference between the two stats providers probably explained by what criteria they use to determine duplicate nodes or maybe “fake” and even spoofing nodes.

Yet though they may have different numbers, they both agree nodes have fallen by about 2,000, brining it now to the lowest level ever for ethereum.

Why Have Ethereum Nodes Fallen?

Considering the price drop last year, many businesses may have downsized, gone out of operations, or may have pivoted, so needing less to run a node.

Ethereum’s hashrate is down as well by about 50% from the all time high with it not quite recovering, so it may be there are less miners who need to run a node.

That number of 5,000, however, is very interesting because it is almost identical to how many bitcoin nodes there were in 2015-16. Suggesting this drop might be more of just how public blockchains develop in the early years.

Bitcoin now has more than 10,000 nodes and they’ve risen a bit by about 100 since January when we last looked to now 10,371 from 10,266 nodes.

That’s while bitcoin’s hashrate has just reached all time high, with its price too now in green over last year.

These are just reachable nodes, however. The total number of all nodes, whether publicly accessible or otherwise, isn’t very clear with some suggesting it could be 200,000 for bitcoin while for eth we’re trying to confirm how many such nodes there might be with Etherscan interestingly stating “A total of 1,795,999 nodes [have been] found.”

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