Updated: Most decentralized cryptos by # of full nodes

We hear all the time about how some coin is more centralized than others, but the question is how centralized? A good way to measure this is the number of "full nodes" in the network. I compiled a list of the top 10 market cap coins by number of "full nodes" plus added a few I know to have a large network even if they have a smaller market cap. Full nodes are computers or servers with an entire copy of the blockchain that can participate in consensus. Node count is important for security, decentralization, and network resiliency. You'll notice the US federal government successfully attacked ETH by forcing them to censor transactions, yet no such attempt was made against more decentralized coins like BTC because they know it to be impossible. At one point, 70% of blocks on Eth were subject to this. Decentralization is security.

After some feedback from my last post, I have updated my rankings with more accurate numbers and included some coins that should have made the top ranking such as Tezos. I've also added a new column to compare decentralization per market cap for a more fair comparison relative to size. All market cap #s from CMC.

Top 10 coins (ranked by # of nodes)

If re-ordered by market cap per node, the ranking (decentralized to centralized) would be:

1. GRC
2. XTZ
3. XMR
4. SOL
5. LTC
6. ADA
7. BTC
8. DOGE
9. ETH
10. MATIC

Top 10 market cap coins with less than required to reach top 10 node count:

BNB (Binance Smart Chain) < 50 full nodes, XRP (150 nodes)

I didn't include USDC or Tether since they're stablecoins and not decentralized blockchains.

Caveats:

• Depending on the network structure, nodes may also need access to mining or staking power to actually create blocks. This chart is nodes that have a full copy of the blockchain, validate and relay transactions, and could make blocks if they had hash or stake power. They are full network participants in this sense. Miners and stakers may make blocks, but full nodes are responsible for verifying that work and propagating it, and are the first line of defense in rejecting invalid blocks from an attacker. Even an attacker with 51% of hashpower can't make an invalid block (such as one which had somebody double-spend or spend more than they had), as full nodes would refuse to propagate those blocks.
• Market caps can change pretty drastically on a daily basis, whereas node counts wouldn't fluctuate as much. It does fluctuate though.
• Of course, decentralization is more complicated than just # of nodes, this is just one way to look at it. Other relevant things would be coin distribution, countries or cloud providers nodes are hosted on, etc. For many of these coins, >25% of their nodes are hosted at Amazon AWS for instance. You'll find the higher the requirements to run a node (looking at you Eth and other smart contract chains), the more likely it is to be hosted at a data center as it can't be hosted on a regular home computer and network connection.
• XMR's node count is probably a significant undercount, since it doesn't count nodes which are only accessible via Tor, which is a number of them and a greater percentage of nodes than other networks which have Tor support. But all of these numbers have pretty fuzzy edges on them to begin with
• You can call this a shill for some of these coins if you want, but y'all gon say that anyways and the facts be the facts friend.