Optimal slashing function for multi-service validator misbehavior

Determine the slashing penalty function in elastic restaking networks that specifies how much to penalize a validator who reuses the same stake to attack multiple services, identifying an optimal rule within the paper’s model of coordinated attacks and robustness trade-offs.

Background

The paper introduces elastic restaking networks, in which validators can allocate portions of their stake across multiple services and suffer elastic slashing when misbehaving. The analysis defines security and robustness against adversarial budgets and Byzantine services, and studies how coordinated attacks interact with stake allocations.

While the paper adopts a specific cost/slashing formulation to analyze attacks, it highlights that the shape of the penalty for reusing the same stake across multiple services may substantially affect robustness and attack costs. The authors explicitly pose the problem of finding an optimal slashing function, noting intuitive properties (monotonicity, potential submodularity) but leaving the precise optimal form unresolved.