# Introduction

Through the distributed staking protocol agents co-create, co-operate and participate in a staking market, to exchange exposures to each other's economic outputs.

Each staking agent may both issue and hold stake, and thus exchange each other's output flows as dividends.

Stake represents ownership of a share of an agent's assets, and/or the flow of dividends these may generate as the result of an agent's economic performance.

Agent's exchange stake with each other through market offers. As result of this exchanges, agents will form a portfolio of staking positions as part of the underlier of their own stake, and utilize their flows to mutually enable each agent's economic performance.


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# 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://marketshares.manifold.one/market-shares/introduction.md?ask=<question>
```

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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.