> Is this the reason that companies are pay interest is because the more coins they hold means their validator percentage in the network and so their profits go

> Is this the reason that companies are pay interest is because the more coins they hold means their validator percentage in the network and so their profits go up? That's about it. But the profits are usually a fixed percentage of your earnings which is the same for everyone holding the coin, so it's more like the central bank paying out interest for deposits, which does not actually increase currency value (you lose value by not depositing). > I was under the impression that PoS meant there was no need for special/custom ASICs in the same way that PoW mining has. Is that not true? What types of custom servers and hardware is necessary for participating in PoS validation? Usually no ASIC is necessary and in rare cases GPU can speed it up a bit. However, you often need decent amounts of RAM, CPU and disk to validate transaction validity and run smart contracts, since smart contracts handle a lot of state like balances of accounts and that has to be computed. So it takes the same amount of resources like a regular database would do.