Most holders lack 32 ETH or the technical appetite to run validators. Staking pools aggregate deposits and operate validators on behalf of participants — or delegate to chosen validators on other chains.
Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance stake user ETH with minimal friction — but you trust the exchange not to mismanage or freeze withdrawals during crises.
Decentralized pools route ETH to distributed validator sets and issue liquid staking tokens representing stake plus rewards. Governance participation and operator reputation matter for long-term chain health on delegator chains.