Bitcoin leads Ethereum and Solana in decentralization, ARK finds

ARK Invest and Glassnode published a joint study on Sept. 1 that found three entities could cross the measured block-production thresholds for both Bitcoin and Ethereum, while Solana required 19. Summary Bitcoin reaches its 51% hash-rate threshold through three mining pools, according to the joint report. Ethereum requires three staking entities to exceed 33%, although pooled delegation complicates direct control assumptions. Solana’s Nakamoto coefficient is 19, but nearly all measured infrastructure operates inside commercial data centers. Bitcoin’s infrastructure is comparatively dispersed, with 63% of measured nodes operating anonymously through Tor networks. Ethereum hosts roughly 49% of execution-layer nodes in clouds, including 20% through Amazon Web Services. The 32-page report, titled The Decentralization Spectrum: Design Tradeoffs in Digital Assets, compares the networks across ownership, exit fluidity, verification costs, critical resilience, reconstruction costs and infrastructure distribution. The findings do not mean three companies control Bitcoin or Ethereum. The metric counts mining pools and staking platforms as entities, even when the underlying hardware, stake or...