A strength of Ethereum is in part afforded to it by its decentralisation, and rocketpool as a network of validators lends itself to giving Ethereum that strength. So, it might be interesting to see how distributed the network of operators actually is, and also visually understand the locality of the growth of the network over time.

• Where are the node operators globally? (An entity running one or more validators)
• Where are the the minipools globally? (A minipool is a validator)
• How do those distributions look if the whale node operators (e.g. removing the >100 minpool nodes)?
• Which region/country/city grew or is growing the fastest?

I invite you to derive your own insights and feel free come chat in the Rocketpool community Discord!

Timezones declared by the node operators on registration with the RocketpoolNodeManager contract were obtained and this was matched with the minipools the operators have created. Since the node timezone is an uncontrolled string, the timezone data was cleaned a little to be able to be mapped to Earthly locations, as a minority of node operators have used this as a platform to show on-chain text graffiti or declared their nodes are in space!

Best viewed with >1400px horizontal resolution

Global Minipool Map

Nodes with Etc/UTC timezone are excluded from the global plot. An orange splash is plotted for each minipool created, with circle intensity scaling with rate of minipool creation.

Count by Minipools (Validators)

Note: click on the legend to filter the inputs by region

Count by Nodes

Node count is probably most highly correlated with where the rocketpool node operator community is actually distributed. Hello Rocketpoolers!