According to a report by Cointelegraph, the market share of the Ethereum execution client Geth has declined by 5.2% to 78.8% on Tuesday (23rd), after concerns were raised about the diversity of the Ethereum network. Previously, it had reached as high as 84%.
Geth is crucial in processing transactions and executing smart contracts on the Ethereum network, but its preference among Ethereum validators has resulted in an imbalance in the diversity of execution clients on Ethereum, sparking concerns about centralization.
An Ethereum decentralization advocate known as “Superphiz” emphasized on the X platform that a bug in Geth could potentially lead to the loss of over 80% of ETH staked on the network. In another tweet, he stated, “Validators on Ethereum risk losing everything.”
Lachlan Feeney, the founder and CEO of Ethereum infrastructure company Labrys, expressed in an article that Ethereum validators may face the risk of losing everything. Feeney stated that due to Geth’s current market dominance of over two-thirds, a critical bug would “immediately halt the chain’s ability to finalize.” In such a scenario, offline Geth validators would be affected by an “inactivity leak,” resulting in the destruction of their staked ETH until the network balance reverts to one-third (33.3%).
Feeney mentioned that 90% of the ETH staked by validators could disappear within approximately 40 days.
However, in an interview with Cointelegraph, Feeney mentioned that the window for validators to exit and limit their losses is “very small” because Ethereum has an exit rate limiting the number of validators that can leave the network in each Epoch.
Coinbase plans to add other execution clients to its infrastructure
Despite the discovery and fixing of a critical vulnerability in several versions of the second-largest execution client, Nethermind, which caused users to be unable to process blocks on Ethereum two days ago, the usage of Nethermind has still increased. On January 23rd, Nethermind’s market share rose from around 8% to 14%.
Coinbase, one of the largest Ethereum validators running on Geth, announced plans to transition to a multi-client infrastructure in the coming months. The exchange explained that since Ethereum staking began in 2020, Geth has been the only Ethereum execution client that meets their technical requirements, but “the situation is changing.”
