Stake and lifecycle
How collateral capacity, validator status, and outstanding obligations govern participation.
What stake backs
Business Validators post native ASSET into a separate account for each role. Required collateral is calculated from the role's aggregate asset notional: the principal or face value under responsibility, rather than the sum of future interest payments.
The requirement uses marginal tiers. Each band of notional has its own rate; crossing a band does not reprice the entire portfolio. When an obligation leaves, the reduction is the difference between the portfolio requirement before and after removal.
Requirements are denominated in USD while collateral is held in ASSET. Changes in the protocol's ASSET valuation can therefore change health even if neither the portfolio nor the token balance changes.
Health and status answer different questions
Stake health describes collateral capacity for a role. BVID status describes whether the operator is active, jailed, winding down, wound down, or banned. An account can be adequately collateralized and still be blocked by its status or a penalty freeze.
| Health state | Practical meaning |
|---|---|
| Normal | Meets the configured collateral threshold; other admission and operation checks still apply |
| Degraded | Below normal collateral requirements; new volume is restricted and reward weight is reduced |
| Inactive | Below the lower threshold; no ordinary active-participation rewards or new volume |
Existing obligations continue when health deteriorates. A top-up or a reduction in outstanding liabilities can restore capacity. A low balance alone does not erase an insurance policy or discharge an asset-maintenance responsibility.
The protocol also exposes price freshness. Its health view retains the last available valuation when the feed is stale; operations such as withdrawals and reward processing have additional freshness checks. Scoring coverage has a specific top-up grace mechanism, so the raw ratio and reported health state should both be inspected.
Price and keeper dependencies
One address held the price-setter role at testnet block 4503, checked on 17 September 2026. The reviewed feeder implementation uses CoinGecko and a six-hour default polling interval; the running service's configuration was not inspected. The contract trusts the authorized submitted value rather than independently querying CoinGecko or aggregating a quorum of data providers.
The verified guards were a 20% maximum ordinary price step, a one-hour update cooldown, and a seven-day maximum price age. The timelock can freeze the oracle or force an update outside ordinary step/cooldown checks. latest() returns price, timestamp, stale status, and frozen status; it is not a Chainlink AggregatorV3 interface.
A sustained decline in ASSET/USD can reduce many validators' collateral health together. A keeper outage can leave prices or lifecycle processing stale even while the chain remains reachable. Track price age and transaction results alongside balances. Protocol parameters gives the dated settings.
Posted and withdrawable balances
Withdrawable self-stake is constrained by the portfolio requirement and reservations for disputes and provisional penalties. Wind-down and pending insurance-book transfers impose additional restrictions. The operator cannot withdraw treasury-owned collateral as its own.
A reservation sets aside collateral for a possible debit. It reduces withdrawal capacity without itself changing the health calculation into a completed slash.
Leaving takes more than withdrawing
Voluntary exit starts a wind-down. Responsibilities must mature, be replaced, or pass through the relevant resolution process. Asset service can stop before the associated collateral liability ends.
Self-stake withdrawals and treasury undelegation use different paths. Do not apply a treasury unbonding period to all operator withdrawals; see Treasury delegation.