Slashing

Slashing and Penalties

Polkadot and Kusama are permissionless public networks that rely on various mechanisms to disincentivize participants from misconduct. The mechanism used depends on the type and severity of the offence. Validator offenses fall into two categories: invalid votes and equivocation.

Reputation Penalties

Reputation Penalties refer to the on-chain peer selection process for validators and are used for minor infractions. These don't result in direct token loss, but they can reduce rewards due to the increased difficulty of performing validator tasks.

Slashing

Slashing is the main mechanism used to penalize misconduct. It removes a percentage of the validator’s and their nominators’ stake, with the amount depending on the severity of the offense.

• Minor misconduct might result in a 0.01% slash.
• Severe security and monetary risk can lead to slashes of up to 100%.

The slashed tokens are added to the treasury, which allows faulty slashes to be quickly reversed. All slashes are subject to the 27-day grace period during which a governance proposal can be made to reverse the slash.

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Info

Learn more about slashing penalties and thresholds in Offenses and Slashes.

Disabling

Disabling is used for more serious offenses and can be used in conjunction with slashing to punish misbehaving validators and prevent them from authoring blocks, backing, and initiating disputes. Disabling can last for a session or the entire era, depending on the severity.

Chilling

Chilling removes validators from the active set and disqualifies them from the next Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) election cycle. Validators may chill voluntarily, such as when planning Downtime, to avoid slashing risks. This keeps them active for the current epoch but not the next.

Chilling can also be a punishment, removing validators from consensus when they are unresponsive or commit slashable offenses.

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Info

More on voluntary and penal chilling in Pause Validating.

Key Takeaways