"Proof-of-work Ethereum miners verified transaction validity before producing proof-of-work, while peer nodes independently verified completed blocks."
I think calling this “validating Ethereum blocks” is defensible in the broad sense - Ethereum.org describes mining as creating, verifying, publishing and propagating blocks, and says the mining node verified each transaction before producing its proof-of-work. Strictly, the GPU was doing the Ethash computation while other nodes independently verified the completed block.
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