Towards an Optimal Staking Design: Balancing Security, User Growth, and Token Appreciation

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the trade-offs in Proof-of-Stake blockchain designs, focusing on balancing security, user growth, and token value, and highlights that optimal design depends on specific platform goals and stages.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of POS design choices, identifies security trade-offs between validator quality and stake quantity, and offers empirical insights into their impacts.

Findings

Enhancing validator quality may reduce dynamic security.

Trade-offs exist between security strategies based on platform objectives.

No single optimal staking design applies universally.

Abstract

This paper examines the economic and security implications of Proof-of-Stake (POS) designs, providing a survey of POS design choices and their underlying economic principles in prominent POS-blockchains. The paper argues that POS-blockchains are essentially platforms that connect three groups of agents: users, validators, and investors. To meet the needs of these groups, blockchains must balance trade-offs between security, user adoption, and investment into the protocol. We focus on the security aspect and identify two different strategies: increasing the quality of validators (static security) vs. increasing the quantity of stakes (dynamic security). We argue that quality comes at the cost of quantity, identifying a trade-off between the two strategies when designing POS systems. We test our qualitative findings using panel analysis on collected data. The analysis indicates that enhancing the quality of the validator set through security measures like slashing and minimum staking amounts may decrease dynamic security. Further, the analysis reveals a strategic divergence among blockchains, highlighting the absence of a single, universally optimal staking design solution. The optimal design hinges upon a platform's specific objectives and its developmental stage. This research compels blockchain developers to meticulously assess the trade-offs outlined in this paper when developing their staking designs.