ARK Invest and Glassnode have published a joint report comparing Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana across six quantitative measures of decentralization and resilience. Titled "The Decentralization Spectrum: Design Tradeoffs in Digital Assets," the framework evaluates how different network designs affect security, control and vulnerability to attack. The firms argue that decentralization should be understood as a spectrum reflecting deliberate design choices rather than a binary characteristic.
The analysis measures ownership distribution, exit fluidity, verification overhead, the number of entities needed to control a network, blockchain reconstruction costs, and geographic and infrastructure-provider diversity. Bitcoin prioritizes auditability, ownership distribution and geographic spread, with nodes running worldwide on diverse hardware. Ethereum occupies a middle position, though roughly 20 percent of its nodes run on Amazon Web Services, according to the report.
Solana, by contrast, operates essentially all infrastructure in data centers and can be controlled by 19 entities before reaching a critical resilience threshold, compared with three entities each for Bitcoin and Ethereum. The report notes that mining pools, staking delegation and other structural factors complicate direct comparison between those figures. Exit speed also varies: Bitcoin miners can stop contributing computing power by switching off hardware, while Ethereum validators sometimes wait weeks to exit, particularly during periods of stress.
Different decentralization tradeoffs can affect a network's resilience to censorship, coordinated attacks and infrastructure failures. Concentration among hosting providers or geographic regions creates points of dependence even when a network has many participants. The researchers said different use cases may justify different positions on the decentralization spectrum.
