The Erigon client is now installed on 7% of Ethereum nodes.
https://twitter.com/paolorebuffo/status/1439456750172835842
Summary
Erigon is the third-largest client on the Ethereum network
To date, Geth remains the most widely used client to run Ethereum nodes, with over 61% of nodes running it, with OpenEthereum in second place (27%). In third place, and growing, is Erigon.
It is worth noting that Erigon’s penetration was only 4% until mid-August, rising to 5% at the end of the month, and then to 6% in early September. So growth is rapid and substantial.
In total, there are as many as five clients that are installed on at least 1% of the nearly 3,600 public nodes in the Ethereum network, although Nethermind and Besu do not reach 100 installations each worldwide.
How do clients work on Ethereum?
It is worth remembering that Ethereum is an open-source protocol, so anyone can make their own client and connect it to the network. The important thing is that it adheres to all the rules of the protocol, down to the letter, otherwise it will not be able to connect to the network.
There are six clients with less than 10 public installations each, including one with a single installation.
Erigon has about 250 public installations worldwide, compared to OpenEthereum’s nearly 1,000 and Geth’s more than 2,200.
Clients on the Bitcoin network
As far as Bitcoin is concerned, the situation is very different.
With a much higher number of public nodes, exceeding 11,000, almost all of them use Bitcoin Core, the direct and legitimate heir of the original “Bitcoin” created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.
There appears to be no other client for Bitcoin nodes with at least 100 public installations.
In total there are nine different clients, three with only one public installation and four with less than 50 installations.
The Bitcoin network is therefore supported by a much larger number of public nodes, but with virtually one dominant client.
Clients, nodes and vulnerabilities
The Ethereum network has fewer nodes but more clients.
The fact of having more clients makes the network a little less vulnerable to any bugs still present in the most widely used software, while on the other hand, the fact of having more nodes makes the network more decentralized.
The recent case of Solana, in which a problem with the most popular client forced the developers to shut it down, effectively sending the entire network offline, illustrates how useful it can be to have multiple clients running.