Resources
How Ethereum staking works
Staking is how Ethereum secures itself: instead of spending electricity to compete for the right to add blocks, participants lock up capital and are paid to do the network’s bookkeeping honestly — and lose some of that capital if they don’t. What follows is the whole loop in four steps, from the deposit to the moment money actually lands somewhere you control.
You stake. Depositing 32 ETH activates one validator. Two addresses are fixed at this point and matter for everything after it: the withdrawal address, where the validator’s balance can eventually be paid out, and the fee recipient, where the execution layer pays. (32 ETH is the minimum to activate; a compounding validator can hold considerably more.)
The validator works. Three duties on three different rhythms. It attests — votes on what it believes the chain looks like — every epoch, roughly every 6.4 minutes; that is the constant one. It occasionally proposes a block when randomly selected, which is rare and unschedulable. And it sometimes serves on a sync committee for a stint of about 27 hours.
It earns from two layers, not one. The consensus layer pays for attesting, sync-committee signing, and the inclusion work a proposer does — and it pays into the validator’s own balance. The execution layer pays priority fees (transaction tips) and MEV, and it pays them to the fee-recipient address at the moment a block is proposed. Same validator, two income streams, two destinations — which is why staking income can’t be read off a single number.
Earning is not receiving. This is the part most staking accounting gets wrong. Consensus-layer rewards sit inside the validator’s balance and only leave it when a withdrawal happens — an automatic sweep once the balance runs over 32 ETH for the standard credential type, or an explicit request for a compounding one, which has no automatic sweep at all. Execution-layer income never passes through that balance; it lands at the fee recipient directly. Both arrivals are recorded on chain, which is what makes them checkable rather than self-reported.
The protocol-level detail behind all of this — the validator lifecycle, the nine-category reward decomposition, and the withdrawal mechanics — is set out with its source citations in Ethereum Consensus + Withdrawals.
Go deeper
Evergreen walk-throughs of the concepts the records depend on.