Though the heavier penalties are supposed to be easily avoided, just a day after the launch of the first phase of Ethereum 2.0 (ETH 2.0), the first validator has been ‘slashed’.
According to BeaconScan.com, since the Phase 0 launched on December 1, one validator was already slashed yesterday.
Thank you brave validator https://t.co/9Evpf5tXB1
— Agustín Aguilar (@Agusx1211) December 2, 2020
The validator has been inactive since epoch 213 (one epoch lasts around 6.4 minutes), when they ‘exited,’ and has incurred a penalty which brought their total income to nearly -0.25 ETH, or c. USD 145 by yesterday’s prices.
BeaconScan states that a “validator that is caught acting “maliciously” will be slashed, penalized and eventually forced into an “exited” state.” Rewards and penalties are efforts meant to protect the network against potential malicious attacks.
As a short reminder: to become full validators on the newly launched Bacon Chain, users stake ETH 32, and become responsible for storing data, processing transactions, and adding new blocks to the blockchain. They are rewarded for actions that help the network reach consensus, such as batching transactions into a new block or checking the work of other validators, and they are punished with mild penalties for actions such us going offline or failing to validate.
Beaconcha.in leaderboard shows hundreds of validators already penalized, placing them at the end of the list. The last person on the list is the slashed validator, while those before them are still active, with the second-to-last validator showing an income of -0.0267 ETH since the launch (currently, some USD 16).
