Mechanism specific to the tea project (distinct from generic proof-of-stake 'staking'): the action of locking tokens in order to back a specific claim about open source and receive rewards based on the validity of that claim. Used as the primary channel for supporting OSS contributors in tea — a fraction of steeped tokens stays with the steeper (incentive to start supporting), part goes to the target package, and the rest is distributed recursively across that package's dependencies.