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What is the Beacon Chain?
The Beacon Chain is Ethereum's proof-of-stake consensus layer, the part that decides which blocks the network accepts. It launched on December 1, 2020 as a separate chain to run validators, and became Ethereum's consensus layer at the Merge in September 2022.
What it means for you
Validator stakes, rewards and penalties are tracked by the Beacon Chain, separately from ordinary accounts, which is why staking dashboards show validator balances apart from wallet balances. ETH held in an ordinary wallet never needed to be moved to it.
How it works
From December 2020 to September 2022 the Beacon Chain ran alongside the proof-of-work chain, keeping a ledger of stakers and testing proof-of-stake logic without carrying user transactions. Today it is a peer-to-peer network of consensus clients handling block gossip and consensus. Time is divided into 12-second slots; in each, one randomly chosen validator proposes a beacon block that wraps an execution payload of transactions, and a committee of validators attests to it. Finality comes from checkpoints backed by two-thirds of staked ETH.
Sources: ethereum.org: The Beacon Chain, ethereum.org: Proof-of-stake, ethereum.org glossary · checked 4 October 2026
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