Slashing is the penalty mechanism that gives staking its teeth. It exists so that bonded operators and validators have something real at risk — but it is narrowly scoped and strictly bounded.
What can be slashed — tampering only
Slashing penalizes proven protocol violations — specifically, tampering with confidential-compute results. It is not a general-purpose lever:
- Honest downtime is never slashed. A node going offline simply stops receiving jobs; its stake is untouched.
- Maintenance / being unavailable is not a violation. Only provable tampering is.
Hard limits the program enforces
- Yield positions are never slashable — a hard guard rejects it outright. See What’s Never Slashed.
- Can’t slash a position that’s already unstaking — once you’ve begun exiting, you can’t be slashed.
- Capped, and routed to a penalty vault. Slashed
$SGL moves to a separate penalty vault (and can later be burned). It is not paid to the platform as profit.
- Performed by a dedicated slasher key with no other powers — it can only slash, it can never move or steal your principal.
What this means for you
- If you stake Yield, slashing simply does not apply to you.
- If you run a Compute node or act as a Validator, behave honestly and you have nothing to fear — only tampering is penalized, and downtime never is.
Slashing is reserved for provable misbehavior that harms the network’s integrity. It is deliberately limited so honest participants are never at risk of losing principal for ordinary operational issues.
