Staking

An overview of native staking on the MilkyWay Layer-1. For step-by-step instructions or live parameters, jump to Quick Start and Network Parameters.

Purpose of MILK Staking

MilkyWay uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus similar to other Cosmos-SDK chains. Staking MILK serves four critical roles:

• Security: Bonded tokens give validators economic skin in the game. Slashing makes attacks prohibitively expensive.

• Economic Alignment: Inflationary block rewards flow to stakers, aligning long-term holders with network growth.

• Governance: Staked MILK determines voting power for onchain proposals (parameter changes, treasury spends, new feature deployments).

• Fee Recycling: Gas fees and restaking fees collected by the protocol are partially redirected to the staking reward pool.

How MILK Staking Works

• Bonding: A delegator locks MILK to a validator address.

  • Through delegating(staking), validators' voting power increase.

• Consensus: Validators run CometBFT to propose, validate blocks proportional to stake weight.

  • Validators are responsible for new blocks and network liveness.

• Rewards: Every block, the chain mints new MILK and shares collected fees. Rewards accrue to each delegator (minus validator commission).

  • Staking rewards provide APY for stakers.

• Governance: Voting power is proportional to the total bonded MILK. Delegators automatically inherit their validator's vote but can ovverride it.

  • Onchain decisions follow the result of governance proposals.

• Unbonding: Delegators submit MsgUndelegate to begin unbonding. Unbonding tokens enter a 21 day unbonding period (subject to change via governance).

  • Tokens are illiquid during unbonding.

• Slashing: Double signing or extended downtime triggers automatic burn of a % of bonded MILK and jails the validator.

  • Slashing serves as an economic penalty to keep the validators honest.

Incentive Design

• Base Inflation: Dynamic, targeting a bonded ratio sweet spot of 60%.

• Block Fees: Gas fees are distributed to the same reward pool.

• Validator Commission: each validator sets a commission that is skimmed before rewards reach delegators.

Slashing

• Double signing: A portion of validator voting power is slashed and jailed. Delegators are automatically unbonded.

• Downtime: Gradual slashing after missed block threshold, encouraging high uptime.

Why Stake MILK?

• Protect against inflation: MILK supply expands, and staking offsets dilution.

• Earn yield: validator commissions aside, the APY is paid in MILK.

• Secure the network: delegators help validators finalize blocks.

• Governance rights: vote Yes / No / NoWithVeto / Abstain on proposals.

• Airdrops: new chains may snapshot staked MILK balances.