Solana (SOL) largest validators as of February 3, 2025

Staking Solana is especially done with Everstake - a validator with over 100,000 delegators - although some pools have high stakes with considerably less delegators. Staking pools work somewhat similar to a bank account, where one would submit money to hold and gains interest as time goes by. In the case of Solana, its own community introduced the concepts of staking rewards and inflation. So-called validators verify transactions made on Solana's Mainnet and get additional cryptocurrency as a reward for doing so. This mechanism is called "Proof-of-Stake" or PoS: people "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. 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 ADA coins - or lack the technical know-how to validate blockchain transactions. In such pools they can "delegate" their crypto to more skilled validators.