Protocol Violations

Generally, we distinguish between two types of protocol violations:

• felony: a severe protocol violation that is immediately punished by ejecting the respective node from the network and subsequent financial penalty. Most protocol violations are felonies, including • equivocation by Consensus nodes or Collector nodes • publishing (EN) or approving (VN) a faulty Execution Result • sending invalid messages (such as blocks)
• misdemeanor: a single misdemeanor only results in a financial penalization of the node. Accumulating multiple misdemeanors might result in a node being subsequently ejected from the network. Examples include: • Execution or Collector nodes being involved in a Missing Collection Challenge • Execution Receipt publishes an Execution Receipt that is unverified and conflicts with the sealed results (aka a potential Wintermute attack)

Ejection from the network

An ejected node

• an ejected node is still listed in the protocol state. However, an ejected node lost all privileges to participate in extending a fork in which it was ejected.
• A some point, a fork containing an ejection will get finalized. At this point, the node cannot participate in any fork. Essentially, it has become irrelevant for the happy-path operation of the network. At the point were we finalized a node's ejection, we would like to start ignoring all its messages. At this point, a node tells its networking layer to ignore the node.
• it can still be challenged for protocol felonies or misdemeanors and needs to participate in the adjudications of such challenges.

The node operator can: • unbond the remaining stake of the ejected node (subject to same restrictions as voluntary unbonding) • create a new node identity and enter the bidding for a new seat

Separation of Protocol State and Tracking of Staking Balances

⚠️This is an update to the previous architecture.

Protocol State maintained by Consensus Nodes

The protocol state now contains:

• the node's networking, staking and (optionally) DKG key
• the node's networking address
• weight of the node (for now, all nodes will have identical weight as long as they are not ejected). The weight of an ejected node is set to 0.
• Blacklist of ejected nodes (details see below)

Note that consensus nodes do not maintain the staking balances anymore.