Signal Quantifying Ethereum Energy Consumption via Network Mapping

Summary

Ethereum's electricity use fell by about 99.95 percent after moving to proof of stake, yet service providers must still report operating energy use under rules such as MiCA. The paper estimates each peer's power from attributes visible on the peer-to-peer network, including client software, hardware, hosting location and validator role. Two June 2026 crawls covering 6,934 peers put reachable nodes at 415 kW, or 3.63 GWh a year. That is about 46 percent of the CCAF estimate of roughly 0.90 MW, mostly because of differences in how many nodes are counted. AWS hosts 12.2 percent of peers but accounts for 15.6 percent of watts, and the authors report a mean absolute error of 4.3 W for the model.