ARK-Glassnode Report: Bitcoin And Ethereum Require Only Three Colluding Entities To Breach Key Security Thresholds, Solana Needs 19

ARK Invest and Glassnode have revealed a joint analysis report inspecting the decentralization architectures of the three largest blockchain networks — Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. Titled The Decentralization Spectrum: Design Tradeoffs in Digital Assets, the report strikes away from treating decentralization as a binary label, as an alternative positioning every community alongside a measurable continuum outlined by 4 design options: auditability, safety, governance, and possession. A six-dimension quantitative scoring framework, drawing on Glassnode on-chain information and a spread of community sources, underpins the evaluation.

The central argument is that each architectural determination — from block dimension to staking mannequin — locations a community at a particular level on a spectrum, and that place carries deliberate tradeoffs. A high-throughput cost community and an institutional settlement layer, the report notes, are designed to sit down at totally different factors on that spectrum. Averaging scores throughout all six dimensions produces a transparent rating, with Bitcoin main on general decentralization, Ethereum occupying the center floor, and Solana prioritizing efficiency and coordination pace over distributed management.

Control Thresholds, Infrastructure Geography, and Scoring Methodology

On the safety dimension, the report quantifies what it calls the important management threshold — the minimal variety of impartial entities that would want to collude to meaningfully alter every ledger. Bitcoin and Ethereum every cross that threshold at simply three entities, whereas Solana requires 19. The authors are cautious to notice, nonetheless, that mining pool and staking delegation buildings complicate any direct equivalence between this metric and precise operational management. The report additionally highlights an asymmetry in exit fluidity: a Bitcoin miner can liquidate a 1% community place in roughly 30 seconds by powering down {hardware}, whereas the equal unstaking course of on Ethereum can lengthen to weeks in periods of community stress.

Geographic and infrastructure distribution reveal additional divergences. Bitcoin has probably the most balanced bodily node footprint of the three, with roughly 63% of its nodes working by way of Tor — a configuration that gives significant resistance to coordinated coercion. Ethereum reveals a notable focus in cloud infrastructure, with roughly 20% of its nodes hosted on AWS alone. Solana’s validator infrastructure is operated virtually solely inside information facilities, a design selection that helps efficiency however consolidates bodily publicity.

The six scored dimensions — possession distribution, exit fluidity, community verification overhead, important resilience threshold, blockchain reconstruction overhead, and geographic and supplier resilience — present no single community main throughout the board. Bitcoin scores highest on auditability, possession distribution, and geographic resilience. The full report features a methodology appendix alongside governance case research spanning Bitcoin’s SegWit improve and Solana’s SIMD-228 proposal.

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