Balance Checkpointing

The Eco Protocol implements a balance checkpointing system to determine voting power for each address at the start of each generation. This allows the Community Governance voting process to start the generation with a defined amount of total voting power, and a fixed amount of voting power per address by accessing the balance checkpoint at the block number corresponding to the start of the generation. The protocol also uses this checkpointing system to manage delegations.

The balance checkpointing system keeps track of the balances of all addresses by block. Each time the voting power of an address changes, a new checkpoint is created to reflect the change, which is then timestamped with the current block number to set the time of the change. If a user has performed Token Delegation, their balance is instead recorded in their delegate's address.

ECO and ECOx both use their own balance checkpointing systems, but only balances staked in the ECOxStaking contract are tracked for ECOx.