Slashing
Two offenses, mathematically verifiable evidence, and a permanent tombstone. How Aevum keeps validators honest.
TL;DR. Validators that double-sign or go offline for too long have their stake burned and receive a permanent tombstone ban, based entirely on verifiable on-chain evidence — never a subjective call.
Slashing is what makes Aevum's proof-of-stake economically secure. When a validator attacks the network, the evidence goes on-chain, their stake burns, and they receive a permanent ban — a tombstone. Every slashing decision is based on mathematically verifiable evidence, not a judgment call.
Slashable offenses
Two behaviors trigger slashing.
Double-signing — signing two conflicting votes at the same height and round. This is never accidental; it's always either a serious bug or an attack.
Prolonged downtime — missing enough blocks during a committee rotation to cross a threshold. Less severe than double-signing, but still a failure to deliver the service that was promised.
Everything else — a brief outage, a slow response, running outdated software, disagreeing with a governance vote — is not slashable.
Evidence and detection
Double-signing evidence is just two conflicting signed votes from the same validator, and anyone can submit it — the chain verifies both signatures independently. Downtime is tracked automatically on-chain and triggers the moment a threshold is crossed.
The tombstone
A slashed validator gets a permanent, irreversible tombstone. The banned public key can never rejoin the validator candidate set again — unbonding the remaining stake or making restitution doesn't undo it. That permanence is the point: it reflects how serious the offense is.
Financial impact
| Offense | Stake burned |
|---|---|
| Double-signing | ~5% of bonded stake |
| Downtime | ~0.01% per downtime window |
Delegators share these losses proportionally with the validator they chose.
Recovery path
A slashed validator can unbond whatever stake remains, but the tombstoned key itself can never validate again. Getting back into validation means generating a brand-new Dilithium3 key — starting reputation and delegation relationships over, on purpose.
Delegator considerations
Delegators bear their pro-rata share of any slash, which is exactly why the validator-selection factors in Delegation — uptime history, commission rate, operational track record — actually matter, not just for yield but for downside risk.