Every blockchain needs a way to agree on what happened without a bank or company in charge. Ethereum’s answer is proof of stake, and since September 2022 it’s the mechanism that actually secures every transaction on the network.
What proof of stake is
Instead of miners burning electricity to win the right to add the next block, Ethereum uses validators: people who lock up ETH as collateral and are chosen to confirm transactions and propose new blocks. Acting honestly earns rewards. Acting dishonestly costs part of that stake. It’s security backed by money at risk, not computing power.
What changed at the Merge
Before September 2022, Ethereum ran on the same proof of work model Bitcoin still uses today, with miners competing to solve a computational puzzle. The Merge switched the network to proof of stake in a single upgrade, without interrupting the chain or changing anyone’s balances. The move cut Ethereum’s energy use dramatically, since proof of stake replaces physical computation with economic commitment rather than brute-force hardware.
How validators actually work
A validator locks up ETH as collateral and gets randomly selected to confirm transactions and add blocks in proportion to their stake. Honest work earns staking rewards. Dishonest behavior, like trying to confirm conflicting transactions, gets that collateral slashed. Because this work is spread across validators acting independently rather than one organization, rewriting history would mean overturning all of them at once, at a cost in slashed stake that makes it impractical.
Why this matters even if you’re not a validator
You don’t have to run a validator yourself to benefit from what proof of stake does. Every transaction you make on Ethereum, and every balance you hold, rests on this same security model. Understanding it is understanding why the network can be trusted without a company standing behind it. If putting your own ETH to work this way is something you want to look into directly, our lesson on staking and yield covers how that works.
Ethereum in Zypto App
You don’t need to stake directly to hold ETH securely. Zypto App gives you a self-custodial wallet for ETH, alongside 19+ other blockchains and 24,000+ assets in total, so your coins stay under your own keys while the validator network does the work of securing the chain underneath them.
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