One of the world’s largest hosting companies has banned mining — the stability of the Ethereum network is at risk

German cloud computing and hosting company Hetzner has announced that its terms of service prohibit not only mining but also staking of crypto assets.

According to Hetzner, the use of the company’s products for applications even remotely related to crypto assets is not allowed. This is especially critical for the Ethereum community — according to Ethereum, Hetzner hosts approximately 16% of Ethereum nodes in the cloud, second only to Amazon Web Services with 53%.

«Even if you just run one node, we consider it a violation of our terms of use. We know that Hetzner has a lot of Ethereum users right now, and we are discussing how best to address this issue,» Hetzner said in a statement.

If the Ethereum community is forced to abandon Hetzner’s services, it will jeopardize the performance of at least 10% of the network. Some members of the crypto community speculate that Hetzner’s statement was a result of the recent sanctions imposed by the US Treasury Department on Tornado Cash.