Bitcoin Maintains Decentralization Lead Amid Ongoing Debate Over Concentration Risk

A new joint study from ARK Invest and Glassnode finds that Bitcoin remains the most decentralized among the three largest blockchain networks, though the researchers caution that no single chain dominates every measure of decentralization.

The report compared Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana across dimensions including auditability, ownership distribution, security governance, node participation, and geographic concentration. Bitcoin scored highest in auditability, ownership distribution, and geographic resilience.

Ethereum occupied the middle ground, while Solana leaned more toward performance and coordination speed. The researchers stressed that the findings should be read as a comparative spectrum rather than a definitive ranking.

The Nakamoto coefficient, a metric that measures how many entities would need to collude to gain meaningful control over a network, revealed surprising mining pool concentration among Bitcoin's top three pools, which control more than 51% of the network's hash rate. However, analysts noted that mining pools do not necessarily own the underlying mining hardware.