Portara is the 1st institutional liquid staking solution, providing liquidity for your staked assets by generating a receipt token.

Challenges

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms have emerged as a popular alternative to Proof-of-Work (PoW), which traditional blockchain networks have been built upon. Instead of engaging in highly complex and energy-consuming computations in PoW, PoS leverages each blockchain validator’s stake of native network tokens to validate transactions honestly and efficiently to secure rewards via “staking”.

Users that participate in staking as a validator typically secure network rewards as an incentive for securing the network. However, traditional staking has presented the following challenges:

• Requires a minimum amount of tokens to be locked up - Ethereum requires 32 ETH to be locked up at a time.
• Capital inefficiency, as assets locked up in staking cannot be used for other purposes such as collateral for loans on lending marketplaces and other use cases in DeFi.
  • These locked assets cannot even be traded without first unbonding.
• Bonding and unbonding periods are variable and could span up to multiple days, sometimes weeks, which means assets that are staked could be subject to price fluctuations with no liquidity.

What is Liquid Staking

Liquid staking emerged as the solution to the above issues:

• Users would no longer need to deposit in increments of 32 ETH.
• Users would no longer have to choose between staking and DeFi, as their liquid staking token can be used as a proxy for their staked position

_Note:_sETH-h and rETH-h represent Portara's liquid staked tokens, to be further explored in the "Token Guide" section.

In summary, liquid staking is similar in native staking in that you are depositing your asset to secure the network, but your staked asset is then tokenized to be used elsewhere.