Alternative tail-slashing curves with lower honest-validator costs

Explore alternative tail-slashing curves that achieve smaller costs for honest validators while preserving the same deterrence guarantee against RANDAO manipulation.

Background

The paper studies a specific tail-slashing scheme that combines a penalty decaying with the distance from the epoch’s final slot and a multiplier for multiple missed slots. Using this scheme, the authors compute slashing magnitudes under which honest behavior becomes ε-optimal for several MEV reward models.

The unresolved problem is to determine whether other penalty curves can provide the same deterrence guarantee against strategic RANDAO manipulation while imposing lower costs on honest validators, including validators that experience occasional accidental misses rather than coordinated tail withholding.

References

Three directions remain open. First, \cref{sec:mitigation} analyzes a single tail-slashing curve built from a decaying penalty and a multi-miss multiplier. A natural extension is to explore alternative slashing curves, which may achieve smaller costs for honest validators under the same deterrence guarantee.

— RANDAO Manipulation in the Presence of MEV  (2610.02143 - Alpturer et al., 1 Oct 2026) in Section 6, subparagraph “Future work”