Staking & Vaulting $AURA

Stake $AURA to unlock tier benefits, earn voting power, and put skin in the oracle.

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.

How to stake tokens

1. Connect your wallet

   Sign in to Aura using your compatible crypto wallet.

2. Navigate to the Vault

   Click the Vault tab in the navigation toolbar at the top of the site.

3. Select your tier

   Enter the number of $AURA tokens you wish to vault. Your tier is assigned automatically based on the amount staked.

4. Confirm your stake

   Confirm the staking transaction in your wallet. Your new tier status takes effect immediately upon confirmation.

How to unlock tokens

1. Navigate to the Vault

   Ensure you’re signed in and click the Vault tab.

2. Request unlock

   Click Request Unlock to initiate your token unlocking. This starts a 7-day cooldown period.

3. Withdraw your tokens

   After the 7-day period, return to the Vault page and withdraw your tokens via the Withdraw tab.

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.

• Tokens remain secure during the cooldown and can only be withdrawn to your connected wallet.
• After withdrawal, your tier status resets based on your remaining locked tokens.

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.

How slashing works

Slashing is triggered automatically by the dispute lifecycle — there’s no manual action required from anyone. After a disputed market’s vote finalizes:

Voter behavior	What happens
Revealed a vote for the winning outcome	Earns a proportional share of the penalty pool.
Revealed a vote for a losing outcome	0.1% of vaulted $AURA is slashed.
Committed a vote but never revealed	0.1% of vaulted $AURA is slashed.
Was eligible (Iron tier+, no position) but didn’t vote at all	0.1% of vaulted $AURA is slashed.

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.

The slash percentage is small per individual vote (0.1%), but it compounds over time for stakers who consistently vote against the community consensus. Long-term, the only sustainable strategy is to vote on disputes you’ve actually researched.

Voting power vs. stake at risk

Higher tiers get more voting weight on disputes — and have more $AURA at risk if they vote wrong:

Tier	Voting weight	Slash if you back the wrong side (per vote)
Degenerate	30	1,000 $AURA (0.1% of 1,000,000)
Diamond	22	833 $AURA
Platinum	16	667 $AURA
Gold	11	500 $AURA
Silver	7	333 $AURA
Bronze	3	167 $AURA
Iron	1	60 $AURA

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.

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:

• Slash $AURA that’s already been requested for unlock past the cooldown (those tokens are pending withdrawal, not active vault collateral).
• 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.

If your vaulted balance has dropped below your active unlock request (because slashing reduced it), the unlock request is automatically clamped down to the remaining balance, so you can never end up with a “phantom” unlock pointing at $AURA you no longer have.

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.

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.