Cloud services provider said crypto activities violate its hosting terms

Ethereum’s second-biggest host Hetzner to prohibit customers from running nodes, mining and storage of blockchain data and trading.

Just when the Ethereum ecosystem is finally preparing for The Merge, german cloud provider Hetzner has warned users that using its products for crypto activities (such as mining and staking, farming, plotting, storage of blockchain data and trading) is against its terms of service and may restrict access to its services.

In an official statement on Reddit, the second-most popular cloud services provider for Ethereum miners at present – which hosts roughly 16% of Ethereum hosting nodes and 42% of Solana nodes, according to data from Ethernodes – shocked the community warning that “using our products for any application related to mining, even remotely related, is not permitted.”

“We are aware that there are many Ethereum users currently at Hetzner, and we have been internally discussing how we can best address this issue. If you, or any other potential customers are unsure about whether your use case will violate our ToS, please reach out to us,” the company said in the post.

Hetzner’s unexpected twist brings up the issue of centralization of the cryptographic technology stack once more. Both mainstream and crypto-native infrastructure service providers tend to be centralized, posing single points of failure for crypto applications if they run into problems or discontinue their services. No decentralized tech stacks can currently sustain the magnitude of the cryptocurrency market as it is.

The majority of the Ethereum ecosystem currently mainly runs on Amazon.com, which hosts 54% of the total Ethereum nodes. Some of the mainstream cloud providers that currently host Ethereum nodes include Oracle Cloud (4.1%), Alibaba (2.8%) and Google Cloud (2.7%).