ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ

Liquid staking project Lido beat major crypto exchanges Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance as the biggest staking pool for Ethereum in 2022. Staking pools work somewhat similar to a bank account, where one would submit money to be held and gains interest as time goes by. In the case of Ethereum, this was done on a system called Beacon Chain. This experimental system ran alongside the original Ethereum blockchain since 2020, essentially beta testing Ethereum's future transition from Proof-of-Work (mining) to Proof-of-Stake (staking) - which occurred in the Ethereum Merge of September 2022, when Ethereum and Beacon Chain merged together. In "Proof-of-Stake" or PoS, people - or "validators" - commit - or "stake" - their own cryptocurrency in an automated system - often a wallet, where people will simply hold their crypto - which at certain times will randomly pick a person who gets to validate a batch of blockchain transactions and gains new cryptocurrency as a reward. The staking pools serve as an easy point of entry for those who do not have a lot of cryptocurrency - and might have less chance to get picked than those who do have many ETH coins - or lack the technical know-how to validate blockchain transactions.