As a report has it, Ethereum 2.0 validators belonging to Staked.us were hit with a $30,000 penalty for double voting on the network accidentally.
On 2nd February 2021, at least 75 nodes were notably penalized on the ETH 2.0 network. According to the data from the website dedicated to tracking the ETH 2.0 mainnet, BeaconCha.in, all nodes involved were slashed one after the other within minutes.
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In Ethereum, slashing is the process of punishing nodes for performing malicious actions. In this regard, the slashing was initiated by either double voting or running the staking software on two computers concurrently.
Slashed Validators Belong To Staked.us
According to the report, the validators affected by the major slash belong to the Ethereum 2.0 staking service provider, Staked.us.
In a recent blog post, Staked.us admitted the misdeed that led to the penalty:
“Staked chased technical performance over double-signing robustness and that’s not a good trade off. No customers were harmed in this interaction but it was an expensive lesson for Staked and we are sharing our learnings in case they help others.”
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Explaining what really went wrong, Staked.us wrote:
“We made the mistake of chasing attestation performance at the expense of reliability in attestation. Even though we have an internal mantra to always choose robustness over downtime, we still went awry.
“ETH2 has led to a new set of performance criteria. The block explorers all publish attestation rate (the percentage of time you successfully sign blocks when you are scheduled to do so). This impacts customer revenue, so we’ve been very focused our customers earn the highest yields.”
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The incident cost the company about 18 ETH worth $30,000 at current prices. Howbeit, Staked.us has acknowledged that it will fully compensate its customers:
“Staked will reimburse clients for both slashed ETH and lost rewards. We will contact impacted clients with details on how this will happen.”
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