Slashing Action

Once the ResponseVerificationPeriod is over, anyone can penalize an enclave provider if most of the Auditors report that the enclave was offline during an Age. The penalty increases with the duration of the unavailability of the enclave during the Epoch. Any challenges for the enclave provider staking have to be made within $g$ seconds (OperatorSlashingPeriod) after the end of the Response Verfication phase (that is, within $f + g$ seconds after the end of the epoch). The challenger has to stake POND tokens to create a challenge and provide the AgeID to be checked on-chain. The challenge is valid if the enclave was infact inactive as per the audit responses of majority of the auditors. The Tokens staked by enclave provider are then slashed and the challenger receives a portion of the slashed Tokens. If the challenge is invalid, then the POND tokens staked by the challenger are slashed.

Auditors only receive rewards if they submit the audit responses. If the auditors do not receive any response from the enclaves, they do not receive any rewards. This ensures that the auditors have no incentive to not submit the audit data they receive from enclaves on-chain and falsely mark them as unavailable.