Ethereum (ETH) largest staking pools as of September 22, 2022

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.