One of the most prominent figures in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space and founder of the Synthetix protocol, Kain Warwick has had some lousy luck quite recently. As it turns out, a small and unfortunate mishap resulted in the accidental shutdown of his DappNode. Due to this mishap, he lost some of his ETH in the form of validator penalties. Warwick took to Twitter to discuss his mishap with the public. He told the crypto space that somehow his Ethereum’s node hardware had been switched off by accident. Since the node was shut off, Warwick had to suffer through continuous slashing for a number of days, which ended up with him losing some of his ETH in the process.
The most upsetting part for Warwick is that he has no idea who is behind it, but he couldn’t get angry at his prime suspects if it turns out to be one of them. After all, the prime suspects in this unfortunate act of sabotage are none other than his toddler or his Roomba. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Warwick hasn’t lost a lot, particularly considering the scope of his wealth. His losses amount to less than 1 ETH. The man found the whole incident more amusing and frustrating than anything else and said that this is a warning for stakers if any unforeseen dilemma were to happen.
The good news for Warwick is that his problem can be resolved rather simply. All he has to do is turn around his DappNode, which would mean that the power button is against the wall, which makes it inaccessible. The only problem is that others are not as lucky. As a matter of fact, there is a long thread on Reddit about this issue. There have been a number of examples about a number of users who got ‘slashed’ and resulted in subsequent debates regarding Beacon Chain’s new proof-of-stake system.
As a matter of fact, one user with the name ‘Rock1006’ said that running two instances of the validator in question had resulted in him being slashed. Another user said that something similar had happened after he ran four instances of the validator and he had gotten slashed for ‘Proper Violation’. As of now, the ETH 2.0 staking can only be done one-way because the staked funds will have to be locked for a year. The withdrawal of the staked funds will only be possible after a merging of ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0.
The Slashing mechanism is actually a negative incentive for trying to protect the overall network. The purpose of the design is to punish validators who are not doing their task properly and there are two ways to accomplish this. The first is to ensure that no validator is able to act maliciously or underperform otherwise and the second is to unnecessarily increase the expenses for attacking the network to an extent that it becomes unfeasible. There are a number of ways slashing can happen, including accidentally going below the 32 ETH threshold.
