# Stake Stake is an ownership of a financial exposure to the contingencies of a performance. It frames contingency as economic potentiality: it is a financial position on a performance. It creates a social relationship, through a set of rights, different to equity, but definitely invoking the skin in the game aspect. In a sense, it generalizes “equity” into an economic connectivity pipeline through which information (e.g. dividends) can flow. Stakes are offered to the market, with no knowledge of which agent (prepared to accept the offer) will end up the owner, and can circulate in a secondary market. Buying stake in a performance is a way to signal the network what you want to make happen. Furthermore, the economic space protocol incentivizes participants to hold on to the network’s stake as a store of value. The network protocol financially recognizes stake as the preferred store of value in defining it as collateral for credit. In the process, credit takes a secondary monetary role; clearing it as soon as possible supersedes the agenda of storing it. Through stake, participant’s not only collaboratively build wealth through mutually staking and validating their performances but also get to define what counts as wealth. It is our key econautic navigation, signaling and network primitive. See Reciprocal stakeholding. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://glossary.ecsa.io/stake.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.