Lending 32 ether (ETH) in order to participate in the operation of the Ethereum blockchain and win rewards paid in ether. Starting in September 2022, Ethereum staking became the new way the blockchain processes transactions.
In contrast to the previous version of Ethereum, where there were miners and validators, in Ethereum 2.0, there are only validators chosen at random to be proposers or attesters. Proposers add the next block to the blockchain, and attesters validate the new blocks and the integrity of the old blocks. See
Ethereum 2.0 and
crypto staking.