A joint study by ARK Invest and Glassnode, published on September 1, 2026 under the title The Decentralization Spectrum, compares Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana across four pillars: auditability, security, governance and token ownership distribution. On auditability, Bitcoin leads with a full node cost of approximately $289, compared to $730 for Ethereum and $21,478 for Solana. Regarding security, measured by the Nakamoto coefficient, Bitcoin and Ethereum reach their critical control threshold with only 3 entities each (respectively 51% of hashrate and 33% of ETH staked), versus 19 for Solana. Token ownership distribution shows significant gaps: Bitcoin scores 0.80 out of 1, Ethereum 0.74, while Solana trails far behind at just 0.18, with nearly 59% of supply concentrated in the largest wallets. The study confirms that the blockchain trilemma is unavoidable and that each network makes different trade-offs between decentralization, security and scalability.
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