PANews reported on December 19 that according to Blockworks, Anza, a Solana developer shop that was spun off from Solana Labs earlier, proposed two proposals to consider implementing a slashing mechanism in the network. It is worth noting that Solana has never enabled a slashing mechanism. If Solana implements a slashing mechanism, it will have a way to punish validators who slow down the network - but this will also introduce a risk factor for SOL stakers.
Currently, the proposed penalty mechanism procedure only penalizes validators for so-called "duplicate blocks," that is, when the same block is created twice. Anza has not yet decided on the specific economic details of the penalty mechanism, but the SIMD authors suggest that the staked tokens that are penalized will be destroyed (or functionally abolished). Anza's Ashwin Sekar also proposed a parabolic penalty curve: if 5% of the validator's staked tokens violate the rules, 1% of its staked tokens will be destroyed; if 33% of the staked tokens violate the rules, all of the staked tokens will be penalized. Sekar explained in a validator discussion that Ethereum's penalty curve is linear. Sekar also said that the penalty proposal is still in the early stages and such an update will not be launched until late summer 2025 at the earliest.
Anza’s proposal seems to have received early general approval from the Solana technical community. But enabling the penalty mechanism will add a risk factor for Solana stakers, whose rewards will suddenly decrease if the staked tokens of the validators they delegate to are suddenly destroyed. This risk also extends to re-staking protocols, as some have warned of the risk of “penalty cascades” on Ethereum re-staking platform EigenLayer.
