By late 2025, Europe held more than 73% of all Solana validator locations, and Frankfurt sat at the center of that cluster. More than 150 validators operated from a single data center region in the city, leading to 30%  geographic concentration in a relatively narrow footprint. The core driver was simple: latency is money.

‍Frankfurt became the preferred location because its position on major European network routes offered naturally lower latency and more consistent block propagation than most other regions. Operators found that even standard setups in Frankfurt outperformed equivalent hardware elsewhere.

Specialized networks such as those offered by DoubleZero provided additional optimization paths, but they were not the reason the ecosystem concentrated there. The clustering was already forming around Frankfurt’s baseline performance advantage.

The trade-off was clear. While validators benefited from stronger performance and more predictable rewards, concentrating so many nodes in one region increased geopolitical and infrastructural risk.

Worldwide stake distribution (Source: syndica.io)