A spokesperson for Hetzner tweeted, citing a post on Reddit, that using the company's services for any mining-related activity is prohibited. This includes Ethereum and applies to both PoW and PoS consensus.
As U.Today previously reported, 65% of all Ethereum nodes are hosted by centralized services, with two-thirds of these nodes being hosted exclusively by the three largest providers: Amazon, OVH, Hetzner. The share of the latter is 16.9%.
However, as it turned out, even running just one node is considered a violation of Hetzner's terms of use. At the same time, the company did not respond with hostility and said that the issue will be thoroughly discussed in order to accept the best way of resolving the situation.
Centralized problems of Solana and Ethereum decentralization
Solana is also in the same boat with Ethereum. The number of blockchain nodes concentrated in Hetzner web services is even higher than in Ethereum. Thus, according to Messari's research, 42% of the 95% of Solana nodes hosted by centralized venues are at Hetzner.
The Hetzner post on Reddit appeared just five days after Messari's Aug. 18 research. It has already managed to get enough questions from users surprised that Ethereum nodes have been hosted on Hetzner's servers for so many years unhindered, when suddenly it turns out to be a violation of the company's rules.
At the same time, the largest host of Ethereum nodes, represented by Amazon and its AWS, has not yet commented on the statement of its "fellow competitor" or the ban on mining by web service providers.
Dan Burgin
Arman Shirinyan
U.Today Editorial Team
Vladislav Sopov