Slashing

Slashing is one of the most desired features of Incognito’s core protocol where it comes to help increase reliability and validity for the network.

How does slashing help the network?

The network will be able to detect inoperative and misbehaving validators and replace them with better validators. A node is called inoperative and gets slashed when it doesn’t contribute 50% of required votes in an epoch where “required votes” is defined as the average number of blocks produced in a particular shard. If a node is slashed, the 1750 staked PRV would be returned back to the node operator and they may re-stake at a later time. After slashing has been active for some time, this will increase the stability of the network as the network will utilize “healthy” validators.

Rewards from slashed nodes will be distributed evenly to remaining validators in a committee. This will help increase fairness among validators and motivate node owners to maintain their nodes’ operation.