16. Slashing

Slashing is the foundational economic deterrent that guarantees Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In Kortana, malicious or equivocal actions result in severe, irreversible economic penalties.

16.1 Double-Sign (Equivocation)

Equivocation occurs when a validator signs two conflicting block proposals or votes for two distinct blocks at the identical height and view. This is a severe Byzantine fault that can threaten consensus safety and finality.

Detection & Proof: The VoteAccumulator in every node actively detects conflicting BLS12-381 signatures. Anyone can query this cryptographic proof via ktn_getEquivocationEvidence and broadcast it in a ReportEquivocation (Type 0x40) transaction.
Penalties: Exactly 100% of the offending validator's self-stake and delegated stake is permanently burned. The validator is permanently jailed and stripped of all consensus voting rights.
Reporter Bounty: To incentivize off-chain monitoring and rapid reporting, the account submitting valid equivocation evidence is awarded an on-chain protocol bounty paid from network fees.

[!CAUTION] Slashed stake is destroyed, not redistributed. This is a deliberate deflationary design choice to prevent malicious actors from attacking the network simply to earn a share of a rival's slashed funds.

16.2 Downtime

Validators that fail to propose blocks during their scheduled leader slots or fail to submit consensus votes experience downtime penalties. Unlike double-signing, temporary downtime does not trigger stake slashing. Instead, offline validators forfeit all block rewards and priority tips for the missed slots.

If a validator remains offline for more than 50% of an epoch, the consensus engine marks the node as inactive and excludes it from the leader schedule for the subsequent epoch until the operator broadcasts an un-jail transaction.