This trading & crypto course dedicated to crypto staking is brought to you by the Captain. Discover how to generate passive income with your cryptocurrencies through staking — an alternative to mining that turns your idle tokens into a source of yield.
Holding a few coins … over the short, medium or long term?
Then crypto staking options are made for you!
Thanks to the many innovations coming out of the DeFi space, major trading platforms as well as specialized platforms now offer a wide range of crypto savings products, including liquid staking options. To dig deeper, also check out our complete guide to DeFi.
The goals of crypto staking: saving and speculation
1. Crypto savings: growing your coins
The first goal of staking is to put your coins to work instead of letting them sit idle in a wallet. If you’re a long-term investor accumulating your crypto through DCA, staking is the natural extension of that strategy: you earn a steady return on assets you intended to hold anyway.
2. Speculating on new tokens
This speculation focuses on the reward coin when it differs from the staked coin (example: Binance launchpad).
The whole point of these options is to save AND speculate, since you can target either product in order to anticipate strong demand for the newly issued coin.
From a certain standpoint, staking is an alternative to mining for many market participants, minus the hardware and the logistics. And more often than not, the resources needed to earn an income are far lower!
Like any savings product, a liquid staking option involves locking up funds in exchange for a reward. Here, the twist is that it’s done in crypto in order to secure the blockchain of that crypto or of another one. When you take part in this process, just like miners, you can claim voting rights over the protocol’s governance.
Be careful, though, about how long you lock up your funds, because your withdrawal options depend on each product. Some products let you withdraw your funds immediately after depositing them, while others impose a set period that can run up to several months.
How does crypto staking work? The PoS mechanism explained
As hinted earlier, staking works thanks to PoS (Proof of Stake). Locking up a certain amount of coins is required and helps manage the blockchain in question. Every staker is rewarded for this. It’s the mechanism used by major blockchains such as Ethereum since The Merge, Cardano and Solana.
By staking, you’re the one contributing to the verification of new blocks without any equipment. The process bases your reward on the amount of coins you hold, and in theory, to validate a block, you need to hold at least one coin.
What’s more, the staking platforms used by many blockchains provide them with significant support by optimizing the scalability of staking options!
The 3 main ways to stake in 2026
The staking ecosystem has evolved enormously since its early days. Today, three main approaches stand out depending on your experience level, your amount and your risk tolerance.
1. Staking on an exchange: the easiest way to start
In most cases, you can stake your coins directly from your wallet, or through a centralized exchange that offers turnkey services. OKX, our go-to platform for beginners, offers staking on many assets (ETH, DOT, ADA, ATOM…) with clear terms, for example. Coinbase and Binance provide equivalent services. The upside: zero technical friction — you tick a box and off you go. The downside: you hand custody of your coins to a third party (“not your keys, not your coins”).
2. Liquid staking: staking without locking up your coins
This is the revolution of recent years. Liquid staking lets you stake your crypto while receiving in exchange a liquid token that represents your position. You earn the staking return AND you can keep using that token elsewhere in DeFi (lending, collateral, trading…).
On Ethereum, the undisputed leader is Lido: you deposit ETH and receive stETH, which tracks the price of ETH and accrues rewards. Lido alone accounts for a major share of all staked ETH. Its main competitors are Rocket Pool (rETH, more decentralized) and Frax (sfrxETH). Liquid staking has become the standard for holders who want yield without sacrificing the flexibility of their assets.
3. Restaking: stacking your yields (advanced)
Introduced more recently, restaking takes the logic even further. With a protocol like EigenLayer on Ethereum, you “re-stake” your ETH (or your already-staked stETH) to secure other services on top of the main blockchain, and earn additional rewards. EigenLayer has become one of the largest DeFi protocols by total value locked. Watch out: it’s also an extra layer of risk (broader slashing, reliance on several smart contracts) — best reserved for advanced users who already have a solid grasp of standard staking.
