Seventy-five Eth2 validators got slashed this week due to a bug witnessed by Staked

A total of 75 Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) validators got slashed earlier this week due to a technical issue witnessed by the staking infrastructure firm Staked.

Slashing in Eth2 occurs when the network rules are broken. In that process, Eth2 validators or node operators are removed from the network, and a portion of their stake is burned.

As for Staked, the slashing penalty is around 18 ether (ETH), co-founder and CEO Tim Ogilvie told The Block. That is about $30,000.

Since this was a technical issue of Staked, the affected validators won't suffer any economical loss, Ogilvie told The Block, adding that the firm will fully compensate them.

Source: Beaconcha.in, The Block Research

As for what went wrong, Staked said the slashing occurred because the firm was making some validator performance improvement upgrades but introduced a bug in the process.

Specifically, Staked was trying to improve the attestation or signing rate of its validators so that they can produce more blocks and earn more staking rewards. But in the process, the firm disabled the on-client slashing protection database of Prysm.

"Obviously, we should not have disabled the persistence of Prysm's database in pursuit of better performance," said Staked. "The performance gains we achieved weren't worth the additional risk we inadvertently added."

To avoid this issue from happening again, Staked said it has introduced changes to the way it deploys new nodes so that they can't participate with validators until they are fully-synced.

Overall, the issue was an "expensive lesson" for Staked, and the firm said it will "get better."

Staked is one of the largest Eth2 validators, as The Block reported recently. The firm currently has a share of about 9% in Eth2's total stake, or about $425 million, according to The Block Research. The current total stake of Eth2 is around $4.8 billion, according to the Eth2 deposit contract address.