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What if a financial system could run itself not by burning electricity, but by rewarding good behavior? That’s the promise of staking, a mechanism that powers many modern blockchains by turning users into network operators. 

In this week’s episode of The Clear Crypto Podcast, hosts Gareth Jenkinson and Nathan Jeffay sit down with StarkWare’s Noam Nisan to unpack how this trustless engine works, why it matters and what’s really at stake.

Understanding staking

Jeffay began by highlighting how staking is part of the backbone that keeps the blockchain running, and runs itself, with volunteers.

“By doing this, they’re saying, OK, we’re taking this task of running the blockchain seriously. Here's some of our money. We're putting it down. We're showing that we're serious about doing this.”

To help unpack this topic further and examine the deeper mechanics behind staking, the hosts are joined by Noam Nisan, principal researcher at StarkWare and a widely respected computer scientist who has held roles at Google and Princeton.

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“So we have this general system with operators... Why would they want to do that? The system, the protocol, incentivizes them to actually run the system,” Nisan explained. “Basically, it can give them tokens for operating the system.”

Staking offers what Nisan describes as two distinct types of security: computer science-based guarantees and economic disincentives for bad actors. 

“If a majority or supermajority, maybe two-thirds of the parties of the token of the staked amount are behaving properly... we can prove that the system acts correctly,” he said.

“But you also have what I would call an economic guarantee... if they destroy the system, very likely the value of the token... will go down. So they are the one losing.”

PoW vs PoS

Jenkinson, a vocal Bitcoin (BTC) supporter, posed the classic comparison: proof-of-work vs proof-of-stake. “Do you have any strong feelings about one or the other?” he asked.

“The truth is that it’s not clear.. it's really a social question, I think.”

Nisan noted that both mechanisms involve trade-offs around cost, control, and decentralization. The episode also explores the role of staking in tokenomics and system design. Nisan unpacks how fee mechanics and inflation controls, such as Ethereum’s minting curve, help keep the ecosystem in balance.

To hear the full conversation on The Clear Crypto Podcast,  listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows! 

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