I think we want to think about the network as decomposing into institutions with distinct governance, which could be any service provider, be it consensus, routing, solving/compute, storage. Then funding streams could be seen as voting on allocation distributions of the output of an institution, e.g. how bandwidth of a consensus provider is used, or how storage is allocated to current and potential users.
Then stake of a composed institution (or the whole network) would act as votes on distribution for the aggregate output, subject to internal commitments being upheld.
The value of stake should then in expectation not exceed the utility agents could derive from the voting power it confers. For this to hold, switching costs and barriers to entry need to stay sufficiently low, s.t. users could always choose to use a service, that better approximates their target distribution.
Using and incrementally staking in a service become equivalent if we do mutual network credit based on service consumption.
The utility from stake will depend on:
- The preferences of the constituents for what the target distribution should look like (although this is not stationary and the state value derives from value of potential future outpus).
- The mechanism(s) aggregating preferences within institutions.
- How well the self regulation of the institutions can bound their aggregate behavior to realize the aggregate target distributions.