About Signatures and Stakes

What are Signatures?

Signatures are data validations stored on a blockchain by your wallet. Every action on Community Platform such as commenting, creating proposals, upvoting etc. requires a signature to be created on the blockchain first. This signature contains the sender wallet address, identifier, data (usually a hash), timestamp and optionally an A0T stake. This way any content on the platform can be validated on the blockchain and data integrity can be guaranteed.

This system also allows the community platform to work without any user database, logins, etc. Security and identity management is handled by the blockchain.

What are Stakes?

Stakes are A0T tokens locked on the blockchain (in a signature) until you unstake them. When unstaking, the tokens are returned to your wallet. No tokens are gained or lost during staking, they are only locked for a period of time.

The reason for staking A0T tokens is to make sure that tokens are used only once at any given time. Imagine a scenario where a user upvotes proposals using A0T tokens. Because his upvotes are backed by A0T tokens locked in his signatures, he cannot transfer his tokens to another wallet and upvote again. Unstaking his tokens before the proposal period ends will also remove them from the upvote count.

TL;DR: Staking locks A0T tokens for a period of time to prevent double-actions, spam and ensures authenticity.

How to create a signature?

When interacting with the platform, a signature confirmation popup will appear when a signature is needed. The popup contains information about the signature and the stake.
What you need to do is to confirm the signature and (if staking) spending allowance in the popup. This will open transaction confirmation in your Web3 wallet, confirm that and the signature is created. The platform will automatically handle the rest.

How to unstake?

Unstaking is simple. In My Stakes page, you can see all your stakes and their status. The status tells you if it's "safe to unstake" - meaning the stake is no longer needed and unstaking will not affect the original action (upvote etc.), or "unsafe to unstake" - meaning the stake is still relevant and unstaking now would invalidate the action. This depends on the signature type, different use cases on the platform have different staking requirements.
To make it easy, you can unstake all "safe" stakes at once using the "Unstake Safe" button.
Another way is to see My Signatures page and unstake individual signatures, but this page is less user-friendly.