PANews reported on December 19 that Anza, the Solana developer store that was spun off from Solana Labs earlier, proposed two proposals to consider implementing a penalty mechanism (slashing) in the network. It is worth noting that Solana has never enabled a penalty mechanism; if Solana implements a penalty mechanism, it will have a way to punish those validators that slow down the network—but this will also introduce a risk factor for SOL stakers.
Currently, the proposed penalty mechanism procedure only punishes validators for so-called 'duplicate blocks', that is, the situation where the same block has been created twice. Anza has not yet decided on the specific economic details of the penalty mechanism, but the author of SIMD suggested destroying (or functionally abolishing) the penalized staked tokens. Anza's Ashwin Sekar also proposed a parabolic penalty curve: if 5% of a validator's staked tokens violate the rules, then 1% of their staked tokens will be destroyed; and if 33% of the staked tokens violate the rules, then all staked tokens will be punished. Sekar explained in a validator discussion session that Ethereum's penalty curve is linear. Sekar also stated that this penalty proposal is still in the early stages and such updates will not be released until the summer of 2025 at the earliest.
Anza's proposal seems to have received early widespread recognition from the Solana technical community. However, enabling the penalty mechanism will add a risk factor for Solana stakers; if the staked tokens of the validator they delegated suddenly get destroyed, their rewards will suddenly decrease. This risk also extends to re-staking protocols, as there have been warnings about the 'penalty cascading' risk on Ethereum's re-staking platform EigenLayer.
