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Slashing is now live on Othentic Stack with two powerful systems: Modules and Custom Logic.
What is Slashing
Slashing is a penalty mechanism used to punish bad behavior by Operators and keep the distributed system secure. Slashing serves as an economic guarantee against malicious or negligent actions, such as submitting false data, making false claims, or experiencing node downtime.
The purpose of slashing is to discourage misbehavior in decentralized services and encourage honest behavior, liveness, and longevity.
Since The Merge, Ethereum has successfully enforced slashing conditions to prevent validators from violating consensus rules by punishing validators who perform actions that could compromise the network’s integrity. The recent EigenLayer slashing upgrade builds on this foundation by extending slashing-based security guarantees beyond the Ethereum protocol.
Slashing: A crypto-economic safeguard
By implementing a slashing mechanism, service developers disincentivize malicious Operator behaviour and ensure overall security and reliability of the service.
- Enforceable cryptoeconomic guarantees: Service developers can assure users that the service is running as expected.
- Risk agency: Operators can assess how they allocate and manage their staked assets, aligning with their own risk tolerance and technical capabilities.
The cost of being slashed
Getting slashed means losing a significant amount of stake and/or being ejected from the network.
Financial loss: A predetermined percentage of staked funds is deducted as a penalty. This creates direct economic consequences for misalignment.
Risk of ejection: violations can result in permanent removal from the network. Ejected operators cannot rejoin the network, representing a complete loss of future rewards.
Reputation damage: Slashing events are recorded permanently on-chain, affecting an Operator's ability to attract delegators and participate other networks.
The Operator’s voting power is proportional to their stake—and so is the risk they bear. Slashing penalties are applied as a percentage of the Operator’s stake, ensuring that the economic loss scales with their influence.
Simply put, the more stake an Operator holds, the more they stand to lose if they act dishonestly.
The slashing percentage is configurable and varies based on the severity and type of violation.
The Othentic Slashing Systems
The Othentic Stack enables flexibility for developers while reducing development time through production-ready slashing systems that require minimal setup.
To facilitate this, we introduce three complementary mechanisms:
- Modules: configurable and deterministic slashing conditions that can be quickly deployed.
- Custom Logic: the ability for developers to define and enforce arbitrary slashing logic.
- Challenger System: the ability to allow any network participant to submit verifiable proof of Operator misbehavior. If the proof is valid, the system enforces the slashing penalty.
Slashing Modules
Othentic Stack introduces Slashing Modules, plug-and-play components for pre-defined slashing conditions. These conditions address the most common types of misbehaviors that apply to a wide range of use cases. Whenever these slashing conditions are met, the corresponding Operator will be slashed.
For each module, the developer can configure the following:
- Status: module is enabled / disabled.
- Percentage: the percentage of an operator’s unique stake that will be subject to slashing.
- Ejection: If activated, forcibly de-registers the Operator from the network.
Here are the three current built-in modules:
Double Attestations
Slashing Condition: An Attester node submits multiple conflicting attestations for the same task.
Example: If an Operator first claims the task result is true, and then later submits another attestation saying it’s false.
Rationale: (1) This behavior can lead to long-range or surround attacks, and (2) Operators might skip executing the actual logic to save compute costs and instead return both true and false to participate in consensus and earn rewards.
—> Read more about Double Attestations
Rejected Task
Slashing Condition: A Performer node submits a Proof-of-Task that is rejected by network consensus.
Example: If an Operator executes a Task and returns an incorrect result, honest attesters ensure it will get rejected. The Operator who submitted the invalid result will be slashed.
Rationale: Malicious operators can tamper with the result for their own benefit or spam the network with false tasks.
—> Read more about Rejected Task
Incorrect Attestations
Slashing Condition: An Attester node submits an attestation that goes against the final consensus result.
Example: Attesters are expected to attest accurately based on the validation logic. If a supermajority of Operators agree on a particular result, any Operator who submitted a conflicting result will get slashed.
Rationale: Operator attestations that go against network consensus suggest either a negligent or malicious operator, since they’re not producing the exact same output as peers.
—> Read more about Incorrect Attestations
Custom Slashing
The Othentic Stack enables developers to define and enforce Custom Slashing logic for specific use cases beyond the predefined conditions. Such as:
- Off-chain events: Slashing an Operator based on off-chain monitoring, such as prolonged downtime or missing liveness checks.
- Ejecting an operator after multiple violations of a specific slashing condition
- Governance: Slashing an Operator based on malicious activity that is governed by community voting.
In such cases, networks can slash custom amount from an operator’s stake or permanently blacklist operators. Custom slashing actions can only be performed by designated accounts with pre-assigned roles.
—> Read more about Custom Slashing
Challenger System
Othentic Stack introduces Challenger system that allows any registered operator to report misbehavior committed by other operators in the network.
- The Othentic Stack includes checks for different slashing conditions and automatically triggers penalties when valid proof is submitted.
- Challengers are incentivized to participate through monetary rewards, which are paid out from the slashed stake of the misbehaving operator.
- Developers can configure this base reward for the challenger.
To trigger a slashing event, the submitted proof must be valid, verifiable, and deterministic. Operators can submit proof within 7 days of the misconduct.
Once valid proof is submitted, the system automatically enforces the configured slashing penalties.
—> Read more about the Challenger System
Conclusion
Slashing is now live on Othentic Stack—bringing programmable, enforceable economic guarantees to any verifiable service. This marks a major shift in how networks can be built, secured, and trusted.
Othentic makes this power widely accessible: teams can leverage ready-made modules or define custom slashing logic tailored to their protocols.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll build, and would love to support your development efforts. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the Othentic Docs, explore the Othentic ecosystem in the Othentic Hub or reach out to the team via Discord.
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