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Imua is the universal protocol for shared security.
Imua is the universal protocol for shared security. Implemented as a purpose-built L1 protocol for shared security, Imua aggregates economic security from multiple blockchains via re/staking, normalizes it across USD price via an enshrined price oracle, and extends it to off-chain services. This technique helps to unify fragmented liquidity across many different blockchains under a common protocol for shared security.
Security First
Good security starts with thoughtful design. The security of the system should be of utmost importance. Imua should prioritize safety over everything at both the protocol and governance levels. Protect the network.
Protocol Agnostic
In unity, there's strength. By being omnichain and protocol agnostic, Imua should extend an olive branch to all blockchain networks and ecosystems, embrace diversity in technology, and foster seamless cooperation and interoperability.
Trust Minimized
Decentralized trust does not always have to be trustless; but it should at least be trust minimized. No third-party trust assumptions should be introduced beyond the Imua protocol and basic cryptographic primitives, such as Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP).
Democratically Governed
Imua should be bootstrapped and shaped by its community. Through democratic, consensus-based governance mechanisms, every participant should have a voice in the future of Imua, ensuring adaptability and fair representation.
Permissionlessly Open
Imua should affirm an open-access ethos by allowing anyone, anywhere, to access, use, and build upon it without gatekeepers. This should foster permissionless innovation, inclusivity, and equitability.
Reasonably Decentralized
Decentralization is a progressive spectrum. Imua should be architecturally designed to be reasonably decentralized from inception. Decentralization should be an essential principle for building an open market for decentralized trust.
Modularly Pluggable
Flexibility is the foundation of resilience; hence Imua should be designed with an ever-modern, modular architecture. This should ensure constant evolution, adaptability, and an enduring relevance in the face of rapid technological change.
Imua is designed with a modular architecture, incorporating a Tendermint-based Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism, Zero-Knowledge (ZK) light-client bridging, and a fully EVM-compatible execution environment.
This design enables the following:
a smooth interactions for restakers
a seamless integration for developers
a decentralized governance powered by a PoS network of validator operators
Imua introduces a universal protocol for shared security that is comprised of five different layers.
Re/stakers - Re/stakers on Imua provide economic security through various restaked collateral types. These include native tokens, liquid staking tokens (LSTs), liquidity provider (LP) tokens, and stablecoins.
Chains - Chains are Layer 1 (L1) or Layer 2 (L2) blockchain networks. Imua's omnichain design supports multiple execution environments, including UTXO, EVM, Rust, WASM, and MOVE. Client chain contracts contain vaults and controllers—endpoints deployed on each client chain where restakers perform restaking-related actions such as depositing, delegating, and withdrawing collateral. Importantly, collateral remains in the chain vaults and is self-custodied by the restaker.
Communication - The Imua communication layer serves as the messaging conduit for read / write access to the underlying chains. This layer is a modular component within Imua, which uses third-party messaging services such as LayerZero, Axelar, Chainlink, Wormhole and/or IBC. Traditionally, these are used as bridging services, but Imua uses them in a unidirectional format by writing to the underlying chains to lock, unlock and slash, and reading from the underlying chains to update state on Imua. In this sense, the messaging layer acts more like a one-way state peg, than a traditional two-way bridge, which reduces a lot of known security risks.
Coordination - The Imua coordination layer serves as the main control plane and accounting system orchestrating interactions between restakers, messaging, and services. Modules collaboratively execute the core restaking logic, which includes locking, unlocking, slashing and rewarding. A one-way state peg relays restaking actions from the client chain to Imua, which in turn responds with control actions or confirmation messages.
Services - Services on Imua can be cryptographic networks such as ZKP, FHE, MPC and TEEs that run on application specific appchains. Services can also include AVSs or rollups built on various chains.
By aggregating economic security and extending it to off-chain systems, Imua serves as a coordination engine for decentralized compute.
Imua's modular design makes it flexible for developers to build a wide variety of verifiable trust systems using shared security from different blockchain networks.
AI: use Imua to decentralize AI by enabling deterministic, AI networks and systems that can prove task execution, verify outputs, and coordinate activity without relying on trusted intermediaries.
Stablecoins: use Imua to build and launch stablecoins with credible financial incentives backed by shared security.
ZK: use Imua to decentralize ZK verifiers, prover networks, and aggregation layers to ensure honest computation through re/staked collateral and slashing.
Bridges: use Imua to reduce single points of failure by adding verifiable trust through re/staked collateral from multiple chains.
Oracles: use Imua to exogenously increase your security budget and protect against coordinated attacks by verifying off-chain data feeds.
RPC infrastructure: use Imua to bring on-chain verifiability to your service level agreements (SLA) and get rewarded for performance and up-time.
DeFi protocols: use Imua to build off-chain order books with on-chain verifiability making them immutable and censorship resistant to MEV attacks.
GameFi: use Imua to verifiably reward user behavior and validate game-play without having to build your game on-chain.
Imua is the result of evaluating various as to where a universal protocol for shared security should be built. Based on these trade-offs, the decision was made to create a purpose-built layer 1 blockchain optimized for shared security.
