Slashing

Slashing penalizes storage providers that either fail to provide reliable uptime or act maliciously against the network. This page discusses what slashing means to storage providers.

Storage fault slashing

This term encompasses a broad set of penalties which are to be paid by storage providers if they fail to provide sector reliability or decide to voluntarily exit the network. These include:

• Fault fees are incurred for each day a storage provider’s sector is offline (fails to submit Proofs-of-Spacetime to the chain). Fault fees continue until the associated wallet is empty and the storage provider is removed from the network. In the case of a faulted sector, there will be an additional sector penalty added immediately following the fault fee. Sector fault fees are equal to 3.51 days of expected block rewards.

• Sector penalties are incurred for a faulted sector that was not declared faulted before a WindowPoSt check occurs. The sector will pay a fault fee after a Sector Penalty once the fault is detected.

• Termination fees are incurred when a sector is voluntarily or involuntarily terminated and is removed from the network.

• Consensus fault slashing is a penalty incurred when committing consensus faults. This penalty is applied to storage providers that have acted maliciously against the network’s consensus functionality.

Honest Storage Providers

Note that occasionally, storage providers may experience operational issues, such as downtime or bugs, that cause them to miss their delivery of a WindowPoSt. To ensure reliability and to encourage smaller miners to join the network, there are built-in exceptions to the fault fees:

• If the Storage Provider has a history of acting honestly, there is no penalty in the current proving period for a faulted sector in the case of a missed WindowPoSt.

• There are no fees if the sector is successfully recovered in a later proving period.

• The fault fee applies only to the sectors already faulty, meaning, they are from a previous proving period, or marked for recovery. Penalties are only applied to faulty sectors from previous proving periods, never the current proving period.

To learn more about fault fee exceptions, review FIP002: Free Faults on Newly Faulted Sectors of a Missed WindowPoSt.

Was this page helpful?