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Points of Focus
- Three Bitcoin mining pools can cross the report’s 51% hash threshold.
- Three Ethereum staking platforms together exceed its 33% finality threshold.
- Solana needs 19 validators, but infrastructure concentration creates different risks.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are often treated as the benchmark decentralized blockchains, but new research from ARK Invest and Glassnode shows how quickly block-production power can become concentrated when measured at critical consensus thresholds.
Their Sept. 1 report, The Decentralization Spectrum: Design Tradeoffs in Digital Assets, compares Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana across auditability, security, governance and ownership. One finding stands out: Bitcoin and Ethereum each reach their selected critical threshold with just three measured entities, while Solana requires 19.
That does not mean three companies can simply seize either network. The thresholds measure different forms of influence, and both mining pools and staking providers aggregate resources owned or operated by many separate participants.
ARK Invest and Glassnode Joint Report: Bitcoin and Ethereum Need Just 3 Entities to Reach Key Control Thresholds
ARK Invest and Glassnode jointly released a research report on blockchain decentralization. The report found that, in terms of key control thresholds affecting block… pic.twitter.com/Dl5784G9uy
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) September 2, 2026
Three pools account for more than 60% of Bitcoin hash rate
For Bitcoin, researchers used the familiar 51% hash-rate threshold.
Foundry USA accounted for about 27.27% of measured hash rate, AntPool 17.06% and F2Pool 16.96%. Together, the three exceeded 61%, producing a Nakamoto coefficient of three under the report’s methodology.
A coordinated majority could theoretically interfere with transaction confirmation and attempt reorganizations while it maintained control.
But mining-pool concentration is not equivalent to ownership of the underlying machines. Independent miners can redirect hash power to another pool, and ARK and Glassnode estimate that shifting a 1% Bitcoin mining position could take only about 30 seconds.
Pools still matter because they commonly coordinate block construction and transaction ordering. Concentration therefore creates a real censorship or coordination surface even when the hardware itself is more widely distributed.
Ethereum also reaches its threshold with three entities
Ethereum gets the same coefficient but for a different reason.
The report uses a 33% staking threshold, because control of more than one-third of stake can interfere with network finality.
Lido represented roughly 23.04% of staked ETH, Binance 8.88% and Kraken 6.91%, putting the three at about 38.8% combined.
That figure needs careful interpretation.
Lido is a liquid-staking protocol coordinating multiple independent node operators rather than one validator controlled from a single server. And one-third of Ethereum stake is enough to obstruct finality, not the two-thirds threshold associated with substantially stronger consensus control.
Ethereum also faces a different concentration point: infrastructure hosting. Glassnode and ARK estimate around 49% of Ethereum execution-layer nodes run in cloud environments, with AWS alone hosting about 20%.
Solana scores 19, but that does not settle the debate
Solana looks stronger on the Nakamoto coefficient alone.
The report estimates that 19 validators are required to exceed its 33% delegated-stake threshold. Large operators individually hold much smaller shares than Ethereum’s biggest staking platforms.
Yet Solana performs worse elsewhere.
Its higher hardware requirements mean virtually all measured infrastructure operates in commercial data centers, while roughly 68% is located in Europe. Bitcoin, by comparison, has a much more dispersed hosting model, including approximately 63% of nodes operating through Tor.
Running a full node is also considerably cheaper. The study estimates hardware costs around $289 for Bitcoin, $730 for Ethereum and $21,478 for Solana.
The comparison exposes why decentralization cannot be reduced to validator count.
Bitcoin looks concentrated if mining pools are the metric but much stronger on inexpensive verification and geographic dispersion. Ethereum distributes validation across many operators while concentrating significant stake through a few platforms and cloud providers. Solana needs far more validators to cross its critical stake threshold, but running its infrastructure demands far more specialized hardware.
ARK and Glassnode ultimately rank Bitcoin as the most decentralized overall, followed by Ethereum and Solana. But the three-entity result is a useful warning against treating any major blockchain as uniformly decentralized: different networks simply concentrate power in different places.
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