Fidelity, which controls assets worth $11.5 trillion, shared a report expressing concerns about the future of the Ethereum blockchain.
Fidelity Digital Assets shared a research report on Thursday, March 28, stating that the rapidly increasing number of verifiers on the Ethereum blockchain raises concerns about technical capacity and centralization.
The report emphasized that the increase in the number of verifiers gained momentum, especially after the Shapella update in April of last year. The report noted that each new verifier adds an additional connection to the network, increasing the overall bandwidth required to maintain consensus.
“Potential concern is that, as bandwidth requirements increase, verifiers who cannot keep up will drop out of the network; and those who drop out are more likely to be self-hosted nodes. Therefore, rapid growth can be problematic due to centralization and bandwidth risks.”
Analyst Daniel Gray provided more details on the subject, addressing the technical problems brought about by the increasing number of verifiers:
With a large set of verifiers in the network, where each verifier independently downloads the most recent data and verifies change proposals within a short time frame, bandwidth and latency are crucial, and a large number of verifiers is worrisome. The larger the block (data), the more computational power is needed to process and re-execute transactions before the next slot.
