Liquid Newton

Liquid Newton - liquid staking asset

Liquid Newton is the liquid staking token of Autonity. Liquid Newton is minted and burned for delegated stake as stakeholders bond and redeem Newton stake token to validators in an Autonity system. Liquid Newton is validator-specific and represents the holder’s share of the total delegated stake bonded to a validator. Liquid Newton has the staking rewards entitlement rights due to delegated stake when the staked validator is participating in the consensus committee. The Liquid Newton of a validator has its own market price and is not fungible across validators. Liquid Newton is divisible up to 18 decimal places (the smallest unit is 10^-18 or 0.000000000000000001).

A Liquid Newton token can be in one of two states:

• unlocked, the default state in which it is unlocked and the stake holder can transfer ownership by sending to another account.
• locked, the bound state after unbonding in which it is locked during the unbonding period and cannot be transferred by the stake holder.

The amount of liquid newton minted to a staker is governed autonomously by the validator’s liquid newton contract. This contract maintains a conversion rate between liquid newton and newton for bonding and unbonding operations. The rate is determined by the ratio of issued liquid tokens over the total amount of delegated stake tokens bonded to the validator. This ensures that a validator’s Liquid Newton tokens remain fungible over time:

• On bonding, the amount of liquid newton minted has value matching that of the newton being bonded.
• On unbonding, the liquid newton unbonded is burnt and newton redeemed in proportion to the holder’s share of the liquid newton pool according to the conversion rate.

A validator may or may not have had slashing penalties applied and as such the redemption value of Liquid Newton may vary across validators according to their history.