What a validator does
Since the Merge, Ethereum is kept by validators. ethereum.org’s definition: “Staking is the act of depositing ETH to activate a validator, a participant in Ethereum’s consensus protocol.” A validator is a computer running Ethereum’s software with ether locked behind it as a deposit. “Your own validator requires at least 32 ETH and can hold up to 2048 ETH.”
Time on the network “is divided into slots (12 seconds) and epochs (32 slots).” In each slot, “One validator is randomly selected to be a block proposer,” and “a committee of validators is randomly chosen” to vote on whether the block is valid. Do that honestly and you earn a share of new ether plus the tips from lesson 2.
On 13 November 2026, ethereum.org showed 44,188,630 ETH staked, more than a third of all ether.
The 2,048 figure is new. Until Pectra in May 2025 only 32 ETH of a validator’s balance counted, so a large staker ran thousands of validators. EIP-7251 raised the cap “while keeping the minimum staking balance 32 ETH,” to shrink the number of validators the network has to coordinate.
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