An initial impact worth 20 Ether, equivalent to $31,000, has transpired. Simultaneously, the validator responsible for this incident has been promptly taken offline.
The Ethereum staking protocol known as Lido Finance has made public the occurrence of 20 slashing events. These events resulted from a series of issues revolving around the infrastructure and signer configuration, primarily attributed to validators operated by Launchnodes.
This incident unfolded on October 11th around 3:30 pm UTC, as officially reported by Launchnodes. Lido, in its communication on October 11th via X, confirmed that Launchnodes’ validator nodes are currently offline. The slashings have ceased, while a thorough investigation is underway to pinpoint the root cause.
The slashing events transpired on the Ethereum blockchain, and Lido estimates the impact at approximately 20 Ether, which is valued at $31,000. In addition, there are other penalties to consider while the validators remain offline for troubleshooting. Inactivity penalties are accumulating during this period as well.
Slashing, for those unfamiliar, is a process where a validator breaches the consensus rules of a blockchain’s proof-of-stake mechanism. Typically, this leads to the removal of the offending validator or a reduction in the staked ETH that was provided as collateral.
In a subsequent post a few hours later, Launchnode shed light on the slashing events. According to them, these incidents were triggered by an infrastructure and signer configuration issue. They assure the community that they are actively investigating and implementing measures to prevent any future occurrences, aiming to fully restore their services.
Lido, ever mindful of its stakers on the protocol, has assured them that the only impact they will experience is a decrease in their daily rewards, which will be reflected in the next rebase scheduled for October 12.
Adding to this, the staking provider has revealed that Lido DAO maintains an insurance fund with 6,230 Staked ETH (stETH), valued at $9.5 million. This fund is intended to cushion the impact of slashing, but it should be noted that it doesn’t trigger automatically. Lido has committed to compensating stETH holders once the “cover method” has been decided upon, and Launchnodes has pledged to reimburse all losses incurred by Lido.
The liquid staking protocol has emphasized that this process isn’t automatic because it is impossible to accurately predict the total losses beforehand.
In the vast landscape of liquid staking protocols, Lido reigns supreme, with a staggering $13.8 billion in total value locked within its ecosystem, as reported by DefiLlama. The next largest contender is Rocket Pool, with assets totaling $1.7 billion.
To put things in perspective, a mere 226 validators, constituting a mere 0.04% of all validators in the Ethereum ecosystem, have faced slashing since the launch of the Beacon Chain on December 1, 2020, up until late February 2023.
