According to a report by Cointelegraph, there has been a decrease in the market share of the Ethereum client Geth, dropping by 5.2% to 78.8% on Tuesday (23rd), after concerns were raised in the community about the diversity of the Ethereum network. Previously, it had reached as high as 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.
Advocate for decentralization on Ethereum, known as “Superphiz,” emphasized on X platform that a bug in Geth could result in more than 80% of staked Ether (ETH) on the network being lost. Lachlan Feeney, Founder and CEO of Ethereum infrastructure company Labrys, stated in an article that Ethereum validators could face the risk of losing everything.
Feeney pointed out that with Geth’s current market share being over two-thirds, a critical bug could “immediately halt the chain’s finality.” In such a scenario, offline Geth validators would suffer from “inactivity leak,” leading to the destruction of their staked ETH until the network rebalances to one-third (33.3%) share.
Feeney mentioned that 90% of the ETH staked by validators could disappear within about 40 days. However, Feeney mentioned in an interview with Cointelegraph that validators have a “very small” time window to exit and limit their losses, as Ethereum has an exit rate limiting the number of validators who can exit the network in each Epoch.
Despite the second-largest client Nethermind discovering and fixing a critical bug in its client versions a few days ago, causing users to be unable to process blocks on Ethereum, Nethermind’s usage has still increased. On January 23rd, 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 was the only Ethereum client that met its technical requirements, but “the situation is changing.”