Cambridge Research: Bitcoin can withstand a break in global undersea cables below 72%, but targeted attacks on the five major custodial service providers could lead to network paralysis

By: rootdata|2026/03/14 13:42:00
0
Share
copy

According to CoinDesk, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has released a longitudinal study on the resilience of btc-42">Bitcoin's network physical infrastructure, covering 11 years of peer-to-peer network data and 68 verified submarine cable failure events.

The study shows that 72% to 92% of global multinational submarine cables need to fail simultaneously for significant node disconnections to occur in the Bitcoin network. Based on 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations for each scenario, over 87% of real failure events had less than a 5% impact on nodes, and the correlation coefficient between cable failures and Bitcoin prices is close to zero (-0.02). The study also reveals a significant asymmetry between random failures and directed attacks: if an attacker targets key hub cables, the destruction threshold will drop sharply to 20%; if directed attacks target the five largest hosting service providers—Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud—removing just 5% of routing capacity could cause a similar impact.

-- Price

--

You may also like

The Power of Agency: The Agentic Wallet and the Next Decade of Wallets

In 1984, Apple killed the command line with a mouse. In 2026, Agent is killing the mouse.

Understanding x402 and MPP in One Article: Two Routes for Agent Payments

x402 makes payments within the agreement, while MPP makes system-level payments.

Particle Founder: The entrepreneurial insights I have gained the most from in the past year

Stop lean startup, stop lightning entrepreneurship, and think carefully about what your product aspirations are.

Huang Renxun's latest podcast transcript: The future of Nvidia, the development of embodied intelligence and agents, the explosion of inference demand, and the public relations crisis of artificial intelligence

The competition in the future is not just about whose model is larger or whose computing power is stronger, but also about who understands the industry better, who can embed AI more deeply into real processes, and who can organize these capabilities into a runnable and scalable system.

OKX Ventures Research Report: AI Agent Economic Infrastructure Research Report (Part 1)

The existing infrastructure is hostile to the Agent economy. Agents can think and act independently at the "capability level," but at the "economic level," they are still locked into infrastructure designed for humans.

The migration of settlement rights: B18 and the institutional starting point of on-chain banks

In the traditional system, banks decide the settlement; in the on-chain system, code begins to take over this responsibility.

Popular coins

Latest Crypto News

Read more