New stakers often worry about penalties and slashing. To help clarify the differences, we created the following visualization along with supporting resources.
The most common penalty stakers face comes from being offline, known as an inactivity leak. Even after a month offline, the penalty remains relatively minor. Larger penalties require conditions that lead to slashed and force-exited validators. Full stake slashing is extremely rare and requires coordinated actions across many validators to trigger.
| Scenario | Penalty | More Info |
|---|---|---|
| Offline one day** | 0.002 ETH + missed earnings | docs.ethstaker.org |
| Offline one week** | 0.0142 ETH + missed earnings | docs.ethstaker.org |
| Offline one month** | 0.06 ETH + missed earnings | docs.ethstaker.org |
| Surround vote, double voting, proposing two blocks* | 0.0078* ETH + forced exit | ethereum.org |
| Attack by multiple validators* | Full 32* ETH stake | ethereum.org |
* Penalties based on a 32 ETH validator and scales linearly with active balance, so with a 2048 ETH validator the penalty is 64x the value shown
** Scales linearly with time offline