The Terms of Service
Hetzner, a cloud service provider that houses 10% of the Ethereum nodes, stated on its subreddit that utilizing its products for cryptocurrency mining and trading was against its terms of service and that it was discussing what to do with the customers that operate them. According to Hetzner, this rule applied to nodes on both proof-of-work and proof-of-chain networks. Even if a user only runs one node, the Terms of Service (ToS) will have been broken, according to the provider.
According to Hetzner’s statement, they have been internally debating how to best solve this problem, and they are aware that there are a lot of Ethereum users at Hetzner right now. They asked the users to please get in touch with them if the users or any other prospective clients are unclear whether their use case will contravene the Terms of Service.
According to the terms of service, if a consumer does not abide by them, the corporation may freeze access to its services. According to data from Ethernodes, the cloud service provider presently hosts 16% of all Ethereum hosting nodes. About 62% of the Ethereum mainnet’s total nodes are hosting nodes. As a result, about 10% of Ethereum’s nodes are hosted by Hetzner.
The Crypto Disruption
The circumstance raises the problem of centralization of the cryptographic technology stack once more. Both traditional and crypto-native infrastructure service providers have a tendency to be centralized. As a result, they present single points of failure for cryptographic applications if those programs encounter issues or stop providing their services. There are currently no decentralized tech stacks that can sustain the magnitude of the cryptocurrency market as it is.
Providers of centralized crypto-native infrastructure like Infura have previously experienced disruptions. The cryptocurrency apps like MetaMAsk have temporarily been disrupted by these outages.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/08/29/hetzner-restricts-the-usage-of-crypto/