If you’ve spent time researching cryptocurrencies or hanging around in the crypto space, you’re sure to have come across the term “staking.” Staking is the mechanism some blockchains use to secure their network while incentivizing participants to honestly report transactions that occur on the chain. Most people have heard of bitcoin mining and how the rewards for finding the next block are paid out in bitcoin to the miner. Staking is another form of those rewards. To be able to understand staking, you first need to know about Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Work. I’ve provided a brief explanation of both below.Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a consensus mechanism used to decide which blockchain network users are eligible to create a new block, the most famous of which is bitcoin. For someone to be selected and able to choose the next block, they’ll have to solve a particular mathematical problem and then broadcast the answer to be verified. There is no efficient way of finding the answer other than pure guessing, and a lot of energy is used to guess those random numbers.Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is another type of consensus mechanism for creating new blocks on the blockchain. In PoS, you don’t need to solve a mathematical problem. Instead, new block creators are selected by the amount of coins they have locked-up in the network. This removes the need for excessive computing power and energy, while also allowing access to rewards for those without the technical know how of setting up a mining node. Notably, it is not always the validator with the most at stake chosen, as that would centralize things pretty quickly.Security is a major reason why a blockchain chooses a particular consensus mechanism, and there has been healthy debate as to whether PoW or PoS is more secure. Even though every blockchain network…