According to a joint study by ARK Invest and Glassnode published on September 1, Bitcoin emerged as the most decentralized cryptocurrency network among the three major blockchains analyzed. The 32-page report titled The Decentralization Spectrum: Design Tradeoffs in Digital Assets compared networks across ownership distribution, exit fluidity, verification costs, critical resilience, reconstruction costs and infrastructure distribution. Bitcoin scored strongest in auditability, ownership distribution, and geographic resilience, while Ethereum occupied the middle ground and Solana leaned more towards performance and coordination speed. The report emphasized that no blockchain leads across every measure, with each network making different trade-offs between decentralization, security and performance. The researchers stressed that the findings should be read as a comparative spectrum rather than a definitive ranking, as each network makes distinct trade-offs between decentralization, security, and performance, reflecting fundamentally different design philosophies. Decentralization is not merely a philosophical preference - it determines how difficult it is for an actor to censor transactions, rewrite history, change monetary rules, or disrupt network access.
The report applied a 51% hash-rate threshold to Bitcoin, finding that three mining pools could cross this critical production threshold. Foundry USA represented 27.27% of the measured hash rate, followed by AntPool at 17.06% and F2Pool at 16.96%. Together, these three pools exceeded 61% of the network's hash rate, producing a Nakamoto coefficient of three. ViaBTC controlled another 9.50%, while SpiderPool represented 5.82%. The report noted that mining pools do not necessarily own the basic Bitcoin mining hardware, as miners can move their hashing power between pools. Bitcoin also stood out in its infrastructure, with 63% of nodes operating behind Tor networks, while only 16% are hosted in data centers, making the network less dependent on centralized hosting providers. The compromise is limited base-layer throughput, with Bitcoin's conservative architecture supporting roughly seven transactions per second. The researchers link Bitcoin's dispersed ownership profile partly to proof-of-work mining, where miners face ongoing electricity and hardware costs and therefore regularly sell portions of their rewards.
For Ethereum, the report applied a 33% stake threshold because participants controlling one-third of staked ETH can disrupt finality. Lido represented 23.04% of staked ETH in July data, Binance controlled 8.88%, and Kraken held 6.91%. These three entities collectively represented approximately 38.8%, taking Ethereum above the selected threshold. The report noted that Lido is not a single validator but distributes stake among multiple node operators through a common protocol and governance framework. Ethereum placed approximately 49% of execution-layer nodes in cloud environments, with AWS alone hosting around 20% of nodes, reflecting the heavier hardware demand of its network. Its smart contracts support a large application ecosystem, but that functionality increases the computational burden of verification. The distribution reflects Ethereum's earlier proof-of-work period and the changes that followed the 2022 transition to proof-of-stake.
According to the study, Solana recorded the highest Nakamoto coefficient for the selected block-production threshold, requiring 19 validators to control more than 33% of delegated stake. Figment was the largest individual validator at 3.78%, followed by Helius at 3.69%, Jupiter at 2.91%, Binance Staking at 2.81% and Ledger by Figment at 2.16%. The remaining 84.65% was spread across other validators. However, the report highlighted that approximately 100% of measured infrastructure operated in commercial data centers, with 68% in Europe and 21% in North America. TeraSwitch hosted 30.23% of measured stake, with the top two hosting companies serving around 35.7%. Solana runs nearly all of its infrastructure in data centers, reflecting the heavier hardware demand of its network. Despite this concentration, Solana can have a distributed validator set while remaining concentrated in hardware access, hosting, and token ownership, illustrating why decentralization cannot be measured using a single statistic. The researchers associate Solana's more concentrated distribution in wallet-size analysis partly with its early token distribution and its delegated proof-of-stake structure, with approximately 59% of SOL supply falling within its largest wallet-size band and around 80% sitting across the top two bands.
The study found that Bitcoin had the least expensive verification requirements, with researchers estimating hardware for a full node at $289 compared with $730 for Ethereum and $21,478 for a Solana RPC node or validator-class configuration. Bitcoin's measured full-chain storage requirement was 753 gigabytes, while Ethereum required approximately 2,000 gigabytes for a full archive setup. Bitcoin also had the most distributed hosting profile, with only 16% of measured infrastructure operating in data centers, 63% of nodes using Tor networks, and another 15% being residential or self-hosted. Ethereum placed approximately 49% of execution-layer nodes in cloud environments, with AWS alone hosting around 20%. Ownership distribution measures how widely a network's native asset is held, with Bitcoin's top three countries representing 49.6% of stake, Ethereum at 67.5%, and Solana at 55.3%. More functionality and throughput generally raise verification costs, with higher costs reducing direct participation and creating dependence on specialized operators. The report identifies geographic and hosting concentration as potential sources of exposure to regional outages, regulatory changes and dependencies on infrastructure providers.
