Key Highlights
- ARK Invest and Glassnode assess Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana across four areas: auditability, security, governance and ownership.
- The report estimates full-node hardware costs at $289 for Bitcoin, $730 for Ethereum and $21,478 for Solana.
- Bitcoin and Ethereum record a Nakamoto coefficient of 3, while Solana records 19 under the study’s respective thresholds.
Bitcoin (BTC) ranks ahead of Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) in several measures of decentralization, in a new study from Ark Invest and Glassnode, although the findings show that no blockchain dominates every measure.
The joint report, “The Decentralization Spectrum: Design Tradeoffs in Digital Assets,” was published September 1 by ARK analysts David Puell and Raye Hadi, alongside Glassnode analyst CryptoVizArt. Glassnode describes the study as a joint analysis of the three networks across four design features and six measurable dimensions.
The researchers examine auditability, security, governance and ownership, using measures including node accessibility, validator and issuer concentration, geographic distribution, governance participation and token ownership.
When those measures are considered together, Bitcoin ranks as the most decentralized of the three networks, followed by Ethereum and Solana. Bitcoin performed particularly strongly in auditability, ownership distribution and geographic resilience.
However, the report also found an important exception to Bitcoin’s overall lead.
Node costs create different barriers to participation
One of the report’s main comparisons is the cost of operating infrastructure that allows users to independently verify a blockchain.
The researchers estimate that a Bitcoin full node costs about $289 in hardware. Ethereum requires roughly $730, while Solana’s estimated full-node hardware cost is around $21,478. Solana archive-node hardware could cost approximately $48,000, according to the study.
Bitcoin’s lower hardware requirement reduces the cost of running a full node. Ethereum requires both execution and consensus clients, while Solana requires substantially more computing resources.
“Solana does not optimize for low node costs,” the report states, describing the network’s approach as one that relies on improvements in hardware performance over time.
The difference is also reflected in the types of infrastructure operating across the networks. The report estimates that traditional full nodes account for most of Bitcoin’s infrastructure, while Solana has a large share of non-voting RPC nodes that primarily provide access to blockchain data rather than participate in consensus.
Block production shows another form of concentration
The study then examines who can influence block production, using the Nakamoto coefficient as one of its measures — the minimum number of independent entities needed to reach a specified control threshold.
The thresholds vary by network and by the type of failure being considered, so the figures should not be treated as a single standardized ranking, and pool or staking-provider concentration does not necessarily mean the underlying operators are controlled by the same entity: miners can switch pools, and staking providers can coordinate stake across independently run validators.
For Bitcoin, the report uses a 51% hash-rate threshold. Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool together account for just over half of the mining hash rate in the study’s data, resulting in a Nakamoto coefficient of 3.
Ethereum also has a coefficient of 3 under the report’s selected threshold, with Lido, Binance and Kraken accounting for roughly 39% of staked ETH.
Solana records a coefficient of 19 using the report’s 33% threshold — a more distributed outcome at the delegated-stake layer, driven by validators such as Figment (3.78% of delegated SOL), Helius (3.69%), Jupiter (2.91%), Binance Staking (2.81%) and Ledger by Figment (2.16%), with the remaining 84.65% spread across other validators.
Solana’s infrastructure is more geographically concentrated
The report identifies a different form of concentration when it examines where that infrastructure is physically located.
It estimates that 68% of Solana’s infrastructure is in Europe, compared with 21% in North America. Bitcoin’s infrastructure is estimated at roughly 47% in Europe and 35% in North America, while Ethereum has about 41% in North America and 30% in Europe.
The researchers link Solana’s geographic concentration partly to the availability of relatively inexpensive bare-metal data centers in central Europe.
Hosting patterns also differ. The study estimates that about 16% of Bitcoin nodes are located in commercial data centers, while approximately 63% are routed through Tor. Ethereum has around 49% of its nodes in the cloud, including roughly 20% on Amazon Web Services.
For Solana, the report estimates that essentially 100% of its infrastructure operates from data centers.
The researchers identify geographic and hosting concentration as potential sources of exposure to regional outages, regulatory changes and dependencies on infrastructure providers.
Governance differs across the three networks
The report also compares how Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana coordinate protocol changes.
Bitcoin has no central organization with unilateral authority over the protocol. Changes generally move through the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) process and require coordination among developers, miners, node operators and users.
The researchers point to the SegWit debate and subsequent Bitcoin Cash split as examples of the difficulty involved in coordinating major changes across independent groups. They also reference more recent disagreements involving Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots.
Ethereum uses a more structured process through All Core Developers calls, where contributors from different organizations and client teams discuss protocol changes.
The Ethereum Foundation has an influential coordinating role but does not have unilateral authority to change the protocol. Validators generally signal their preferences through the client software they choose to run rather than through direct on-chain votes on protocol upgrades.
Solana has a more coordinated development structure, with the Solana Foundation playing a significant role in ecosystem development and coordination.
The report presents these models as different approaches to decision-making rather than applying a single measure of governance decentralization.
SIMD-228 vote shows validator participation
The researchers use Solana’s 2025 SIMD-228 vote as an example of validator participation in governance.
The proposal sought to change the network’s inflation rate and attracted participation from 910 validators representing about 74% of staked SOL.
The proposal ultimately failed to reach the required two-thirds threshold.
The vote provides a separate measure of governance participation from infrastructure concentration. While Solana relies heavily on professional infrastructure, validators representing a substantial share of staked SOL still participated in a contested protocol decision.
Token ownership adds another measure
The report also examines token distribution using Glassnode’s wallet-cohort data through July 2026.
According to the study, Bitcoin has the most dispersed ownership profile among the three networks. The researchers link this partly to proof-of-work mining, where miners face ongoing electricity and hardware costs and therefore regularly sell portions of their rewards.
Ethereum falls between Bitcoin and Solana in the report’s ownership analysis. Its distribution reflects its earlier proof-of-work period and the changes that followed the 2022 transition to proof-of-stake.
Solana has a more concentrated distribution in the report’s wallet-size analysis. Approximately 59% of SOL supply falls within its largest wallet-size band, while around 80% sits across the top two bands.
The researchers associate this concentration partly with Solana’s early token distribution and its delegated proof-of-stake structure.
The trilemma helps explain the trade-offs
The report links these differences to the broader blockchain trilemma involving decentralization, security and scalability.
Bitcoin’s lower node requirements make independent verification less expensive, but its base layer processes only around seven transactions per second.
Ethereum has increased capacity through higher gas limits but requires more complex infrastructure and 32 ETH to operate a solo validator. At the report’s June 30 reference price, that represented approximately $51,200.
Solana places greater emphasis on transaction throughput and processing performance, but this requires substantially more hardware and bandwidth.
The researchers therefore treat node accessibility, validator distribution, infrastructure, governance and ownership as separate measures rather than interchangeable indicators of decentralization.
Report finds no single decentralization model
The report’s final assessment places Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana at different points on its decentralization spectrum, but the researchers do not identify one network as superior across every measure.
According to the study, Bitcoin scores higher on auditability, ownership distribution and geographic resilience, while Ethereum generally falls between Bitcoin and Solana across several categories.
Solana combines a more distributed delegated-validator structure with greater infrastructure and geographic concentration, alongside a more coordinated development model.
The authors connect these differences to the requirements of different blockchain use cases.
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