The major German hosting provider Hetzner blocked access to Solana node servers. Validators said they received letters demanding the removal of the relevant software to continue operating.
🚨⚠️ Hetzner just kicked off all @solana nodes hosted on their infrastructure. ⚠️🚨
Over 20% of stake weight on mainnet-beta is delinquent, with thousands of validators offline.
If you are running a Solana validator using Hetzner, please switch to a different provider ASAP. pic.twitter.com/rkXwKvXGVx
— SolBlaze.org | Stake with us! 🔥💃 (@solblaze_org) November 2, 2022
According to Google Cloud developer Sam Padilla, Hetzner accounted for 40% of Solana validators, representing around 20% of the total SOL staked.
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Okay, we need to talk about Hetzner banning @solana nodes.
I monitored the infrastructure decentralization of Solana throughout all of August via a tool that I built.
~40% of Solana validators live on hetzner, adding up to ~20% of total network stake.
A thread 🧵
(1/10) pic.twitter.com/obsVUlQE50— Sam Padilla (@theSamPadilla) November 2, 2022
Padilla noted that Solana has decentralisation issues. He said that validators representing 65% of all assets in staking were distributed among three platforms — Hetzner, Equinix and AWS.
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RockawayX validator data corroborate Padilla’s findings. On November 2, the delinquent stake ratio in the blockchain jumped to 20%. This metric reflects the percentage of validators that have gone offline.
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As of writing, the figure had fallen to 3.39%, likely linked to participants switching to other providers.
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During the validator outage, the Solana blockchain continued to operate. According to the Solana Status dashboard, the network did not report issues with message delivery.
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In August 2022, Hetzner banned running cryptocurrency nodes on its servers. The provider stressed that using its products for mining-related applications \”is not allowed\”.
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Despite the warning, many market participants continue to use its hardware. According to Ethernodes, more than 12% of Ethereum nodes run on Hetzner servers.
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In August, Messari analysts noted increased centralisation of Solana and Ethereum nodes.
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