Proliferation of the Service-centric Distributed Consensus Model and its Impact on Ethereum

In distributed consensus systems (DCSs), a single peer exposes functionality to other peers to agree on a shared state for a computational problem, such as for cryptocurrencies and distributed file systems. We observe, however, that this original, peer-centric model has evolved towards deploying several peers at a single network location, thus exposing the same DCS services many times, driven by the fees and rewards that can be gained by doing so. We refer to this trend as the service-centric model and provide in our paper evidence for this trend, its growth, and its impact on DCS operations, using empirical observations in the Ethereum system. Specifically, we shed light on the opposing observations of increasing reliance on highly available cloud infrastructures and large numbers of non-reachability events in the DCS. We provide recommendations on how to tackle this impact through changes to the Ethereum platform and identifier generation, believing that those recommendations and our empirical observations provide useful insights for building resilient and bias-free DePIN platforms.