Voting Power

In traditional single-token staking schemes, such as ATOM staking in the Cosmos hub, the voting power of stakers is determined based solely on the sheer number of tokens they’ve staked. This model is effective because each staked token is homogeneous, holding the same value. The actual value of the token becomes irrelevant as it’s cancelled out during the voting power calculation.

However, in the multi-token re/staking model offered by Imua, the actual values of the different types of tokens become important. For the same unit of token, tokens with a higher value per unit incur a higher cost of attack. Therefore, voting power calculations should be based on the actual value of the re/staked tokens rather than just their quantity. In Imua, the voting power is determined as the fraction of value that this operator holds with respect to the entire pool of value in Imua.

Namely, in an AVS with n types of tokens re/staked, the voting power of an operator is:

where count-i is the number of tokens of type i that this operator has re/staked (which could be zero), value-i is the value of a token of type i, and total_count-i is the total number of tokens of type i re/staked across all the operators in the AVS.

For instance, consider an operator who has re/staked 5 ETH and 1,000 ATOM in an AVS. Let’s assume the AVS currently has a total of 50 ETH and 50,000 ATOM re/staked. If the current price of ETH is $1600 and ATOM is priced at $10, then the voting power of the operator is:

Based on the real value of the re/staked tokens, the operator’s voting power for the AVS would be 3.1%. With this approach, the token’s real value plays an important role in determining how much voting power it represents.