According to a report by Cointelegraph, there is concern in the community about the diversity of the Ethereum network, resulting in a decrease in market share of the Ethereum client Geth, which dropped by 5.2% to 78.8% on Tuesday (23rd), after previously peaking at 84%.
Geth plays a crucial role in processing transactions and executing smart contracts on Ethereum, but its preference among Ethereum validators has led to an imbalance in client diversity on the Ethereum network, raising concerns about centralization.
Advocates for decentralization on Ethereum, known as “Superphiz,” emphasized on X platform that a bug in Geth could lead to the disappearance of over 80% of the Ether (ETH) staked on the network. Lachlan Feeney, founder and CEO of Ethereum infrastructure company Labrys, stated in an article that Ethereum validators may face the risk of losing everything.
Feeney expressed that with Geth’s current market share exceeding two-thirds, a critical bug would “immediately prevent the chain from finalizing.” In such a scenario, offline Geth validators would be affected by “inactivity leak,” leading to the destruction of their staked ETH until the network balances back to one-third (33.3%) of the share.
Feeney suggested that 90% of validators’ staked ETH could disappear within around 40 days. However, he mentioned in an interview with Cointelegraph that the window for validators to exit and limit their losses is “very small,” as Ethereum has an exit rate limit restricting the number of validators that can exit the network in each epoch.
Despite the second-largest client Nethermind discovering and fixing a critical bug in its client versions, which caused users to be unable to process blocks on Ethereum two days ago, Nethermind’s usage has still increased. On January 23, Nethermind’s market share rose from around 8% to 14%.
One of the largest Ethereum validators running through Geth, Coinbase, announced plans to transition to a multi-client infrastructure in the coming months. The exchange explained that since the start of Ethereum staking in 2020, Geth has been the only Ethereum client that meets its technical requirements, but “the situation is changing.”