What is stock?
Stock represents ownership in a company. When a person is buying stocks in a company, it means he is buying a particular percentage of ownership in that company. Purchasing the stocks in a company gives investors a claim to a certain amount of the earning and the company's assets. And an individual unit of stock is known as a share. If someone says," I have 100 shares of amazon." It conveys the exact number of ownership units in Amazon that person has. While on the other hand if someone says, "I have stocks in Amazon." it conveys that person has a small portion of the equity in Amazon. So the share gives the exact number of ownership while stock gives shows ownership in a company without exactly telling the number.
What is a stake?
A stake is often used to describe the amount of stock an investor owns. If you own stock in a given company, your stake represents the percentage of its stock that you own. But it is not always like this. The stake can not always mean the percentage of stock. Let's suppose a small company wants to raise the %100000 and it doesn't have any stock system but still, it can offer a particular amount of stakes meaning the particular percentage of profit will go to the stakeholder even though he won't own the stock of that company.
Hope you had understood what is the similarity and differences in the stocks and stakes. Now let us understand our main topic.
Stake in crypto
So we would understand this by taking an example of the site Leo Finance. If you have gone to these crypto sites there are two tokens in general if one token is "X" then the other would be "X Power". Similar is with Leo finance the main token is Leo and Leo Power. So Leo represents the crypto token you have in your wallet and Leo Power also represents the crypto token but they are staked i.e vested in the site. Converting the LEO into LEO power is called token staking or power up or locking and vice versa are called power down or unlocking. The Tokens you have staked are like investments and which gave you the voting power. the more stakes you have the more voting power you have.
If you are familiar with Sites like LEO Finance or PEAKD, you would have noticed the different voting power of different users. This is due to the amount of staked tokens. If you want to liquidate those tokens so that you can sell them for another currency, you need to unstake. The HIVE and LEO both work on the proof of stake which means the more staked token you have the more voting power you have.
