Vitalik Publishes "Supporting Decentralized Staking Through More Anti-correlated Incentives"

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated on Warpcast, are validators in the same cluster (such as the same trading platform, the same user) more likely to miss proofs at the same time than unrelated validators? If so, can we adjust rewards to support decentralized staking? Possibly.

 

In addition, Vitalik posted "Supporting Decentralized Staking through More Anti-correlated Incentives", stating that one strategy for incentivizing better decentralization in protocols is to penalize correlation. That is, if a participant makes a behavioral mistake (including accidents), the penalty they receive will increase with the number of other participants who make mistakes at the same time (measured by total ETH). This technique has already been applied in Ethereum's penalty mechanism.

 

However, edge case incentives arising from highly specific attack scenarios that may never have occurred in practice may not be sufficient to encourage decentralization. This post proposes extending similar anti-correlated incentives to more 'ordinary' failure situations such as missing a proof once; almost all validators experience this situation occasionally.