Publicly accessible node crawlers indicate that the number of Ethereum nodes ranges from 6000 to 11000. Not all of these nodes are validator nodes; many are operated by professional service providers. The investigation pertains only to stakers using their own funds, not to professional operators. As of the drafting of this report, Rocket Pool estimates 1832 validator nodes, derived from subtracting Allnodes’ count of ETH-holding nodes at the time of the snapshot. This serves as a minimum count of independently operated entities. Out of 1024 total responses, 868 were from stakers claiming control over their node setups. Thus, we estimate that approximately 8% to 47% of node operators participated in this survey, though extremes of this range are unlikely. Note that this percentage includes all node operators, including professional ones. The survey primarily focuses on non-professional operators.
