Stake $AURA

The Aura Vault is the on-chain home of every staked $AURA token. It does three jobs at once:

1. Tracks tier eligibility. The tier you qualify for (and the benefits that come with it) is computed live from your vaulted balance.
2. Powers governance voting. Your voting weight in proposal voting and dispute resolution is read directly from the Vault.
3. Backs the optimistic oracle with skin in the game. When a dispute is resolved, voters who backed the wrong outcome (or who committed a vote and never revealed it) have a portion of their vaulted $AURA **slashed**. That$AURA flows to the voters who got the call right.

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How to stake tokens

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How to unlock tokens

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Understanding the cooldown period

After requesting an unlock, your staked $AURA tokens enter a mandatory cooldown period of 7 days. During this time:

• Your tokens remain locked but no longer contribute to your tier privileges.
• After the cooldown ends, return to the Vault page to complete the withdrawal.

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Slashing: why staking has skin in the game

A pure governance system that only rewards good behavior, without penalizing bad behavior, is easy to game. A whale who votes the same way on every dispute earns rewards on the ones they get right and pays nothing on the ones they get wrong. That breaks the alignment Aura needs: voters should only weigh in on outcomes they actually believe. Slashing fixes the asymmetry. By making wrong-side votes (and silent commits) cost real $AURA, the cost of voting on a market you don’t understand is roughly equal to the reward of voting on one you do. The result is an honest oracle where the most confident, best-informed voters get most of the weight.

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How slashing works

Slashing follows the dispute lifecycle and needs nothing from you. The penalty transactions themselves are permissionless, and Aura’s automation submits them as each phase closes: Every slashed token flows into the penalty pool for that specific market. Once the pool is finalized, winning voters claim their share, weighted by their voting tier, directly into their wallet as $AURA.

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Voting power vs. stake at risk

Higher tiers get more voting weight on disputes, and have more $AURA at risk if they vote wrong: The trade-off is intentional: bigger stakers get bigger reward shares when they’re right, and bigger penalties when they’re wrong. See Voting on Disputes for the actual voting flow.

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What slashing does not affect

The Vault is built so that slashing only ever touches the vaulted balance for the user being slashed. It cannot:

• Affect any other user’s balance, even pro-rata.
• Touch your USDT, your open trading positions, or your market shares.
• Slash more than you have vaulted at the time the penalty is applied.

Two fairness protections apply on top of that:

• New stakers are protected. If your first deposit landed after a dispute’s vote already started, you can’t be slashed as a non-voter of that dispute, because you never had a chance to participate.
• Pre-dispute unlocks are protected. $AURA you requested to unlock before a dispute started is out of that dispute’s slashing reach. Requesting the unlock after the dispute started doesn’t help, since the pending amount stays exposed until the round settles, so “vote and flee” doesn’t work.

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Authority over slashing

Only the Optimistic Oracle contract can call the Vault’s slash function, and even then only as part of a dispute resolution flow that’s already gone through commit, reveal, and supermajority finalization. This authority is rotated through a timelocked pointer: changing which contract can slash requires queuing a new slasher address and waiting through a delay window before the change takes effect. There is no way to push an emergency slash through with no notice. On top of the slasher gate, the Vault enforces a global slashing circuit breaker: no more than 1% of the entire vault can be slashed in any rolling 24-hour window, no matter who asks. Legitimate dispute penalties never come close to that ceiling (a round slashing every staker moves ~0.1% of the vault), so the cap exists purely as defense-in-depth: even a fully compromised oracle could not drain staked $AURA faster than 1% per day, leaving days of notice to respond. Finally, staking is restricted to regular wallet addresses (EOAs and multisigs). Smart contracts cannot stake, because several payout and refund paths must create outputs directly to the staker, which is impossible for contract addresses and could otherwise wedge dispute processing.

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Summary

• The Vault holds every staked $AURA token and tracks who stakes how much.
• Your tier and voting power are computed from your vaulted balance in real time.
• Wrong-side and silent dispute voters lose 0.1% of vaulted $AURA per vote; that$AURA funds rewards for correct voters.
• Only the Optimistic Oracle can trigger a slash, and only after a finalized dispute vote.
• You retain full custody. Aura cannot move, freeze, or arbitrarily reduce your vaulted balance outside the explicit dispute flow.