Staking infrastructure provider Staked said it learned “an expensive lesson” after 75 of its Eth2 validators were removed from the staking pool on Feb. 4 as a penalty for making competing blocks.
In a statement, Staked took the blame for the “technical problem” and said its customers would be “fully compensated”. The company pays the fine of 18 ETH, which at current prices is around $ 29,000.
An unexpected response to configuration changes resulted in several Staked managed nodes rebooting incorrectly, causing them to incorrectly sign a second version of a previously signed block. This led to a split in the Ethereum blockchain.
Post-mortem of the recent Eth2 slashing event from @staked_us:
TLDR – Disabling persistence of the Prysm database for slash protection on the client while restarting the Validator client to improve attestation performance resulted in a double signature resulting in a slash
– Rajeev (@ 0xRajeev) February 4, 2021
According to Eth2 statistics, which were kept at Beaconcha.in, the Snafu at Staked led to the largest single validator slashing event since the Beacon Chain project went live on December 1, 2020. Validator slashings have been rare so far.
Staked admitted that he had made mistakes while pursuing “engineering performance over robustness with double signature” and described the result as “not a good compromise”.
“We tried to increase the number of beacon nodes to get better performance […] The performance gains we saw weren’t worth the extra risk we accidentally added. “
Staked added that the bug did not damage any customer funds and that affected customers with ETH in the slashed validators and their accumulated rewards will be reimbursed.
Your support has not responded which is worrying for such a small company, trying to do so much.
I was wondering why my ETH2 deposit cannot be tracked from your platform and now my validator has failed without updating from your platform, why? pic.twitter.com/CPgz8xYiWk
– Ho HO (@DCC_Jon) February 4, 2021
The examiners were slashed between blocks 456892 and 457585, with the official reason for the slicing listed as “Attestation Violation”.
Anticipation for Eth2 is growing as arrogant gas fees prevent ordinary users from making transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. However, the bug currently being introduced by Staked is a reminder that significant testing is still required before Eth2 can move on to the next phase of release.
Despite the recent cut, the number of validators in the Beacon Chain – the initial phase of the Eth2 rollout – is currently at an all-time high of 91,701. This corresponds to a profit of 25,000 validators in the last two weeks.
With 32 ETH per validator, the total value of Ether stored in the Eth2 deposit contract is now $ 4.7 billion.
