Imua

Imua is a shared security protocol that is itself a purpose-built Layer 1: restakers pool the economic security of assets such as bitcoin, ether, SOL and XRP and delegate it to operators, who spend that security budget on securing verifiable off-chain services such as AI inference verification and verifiable compute, with rewards coming from the services' real revenue rather than issuance. The architecture uses Tendermint consensus, a zero-knowledge light client bridge and one-way state anchoring to reduce common bridge risks. It targets fragmented chain security and off-chain services with no decentralised trust base.

Selling restaked security to off-chain services distinguishes it from restaking protocols that only serve their own chain: security becomes a priced, rentable resource. The cost is that slashing risk travels down the delegation chain, so restakers may absorb losses when an operator misbehaves or goes down; one-way anchoring lowers the chance of a reverse bridge exploit but also slows assets returning. In February 2026 the team worked on cross-chain messaging and pre-launch contract hardening at EthDenver, more than a dozen verifiable services are building on it, and mainnet is still being prepared.