ANNOUNCEMENT: DECENTRALISED SYSTEM OF PENALTIES FOR POORLY PERFORMING VALIDATORS The current system of penalising poorly performing validators will be fully operational next Monday, September 9. How do validators determine that another validator has performed poorly? The TON is supplied with the lite-client utility. In lite-client there is a checkloadall command. This command analyses how many blocks the validator should have processed, and how many it actually processed in a given period of time. If the validator processed less than 90% of the expected number of blocks during a validation round, it is considered to be performing poorly and should be penalised. Technical description of the process: https://github.com/ton-blockchain/TIPs/issues/13#issuecomment-786627474 When and by whom a complaint is filed? After each validation round (~18 hours), the validator stakes of validators that participated in that round are on the Elector smart contract for another ~9 hours. During this time, anyone can send a complaint against a validator who performed poorly in said round. This happens onchain on the Elector smart contract. All validators do not need to send a complaint. How a complaint is validated? After each validation round, validators receive a list of complaints from the Elector smart contract and double-check them by calling checkloadall. If a complaint is validated, they onchain vote in favour of that complaint. These actions are built into mytonctrl and happen automatically. If the complaint has 66% of the validators' votes (by their weight), a penalty is taken off from the validator's stake. What is the size of the fine? The amount of the fine is fixed and equals 101 TON, which is roughly equal to the validator's income per round. Where does this fine go? The fine is distributed among the validators minus network costs and a small reward (~8 TON) to the validator who sent the correct complaint. When was this functionality made? This functionality was made in mytonctrl back in February 2021 https://github.com/ton-blockchain/TIPs/issues/13. The complaints and fines functionality in the Elector system smart contract was made initially at the time of network launch. Why didn't the penalty functionality work well earlier? The network fee for sending complaints was significant, which as the Toncoin exchange rate increased, made it uneconomical to send them. This has now been fixed by optimising the complaint message. In a week from 9 September 2024, an automatic complaint sender will start working on several nodes in the network. Is the system decentralised? Yes, anyone can send a complaint, the penalty is only applied by a quorum of validators on the network. There is no way for anyone to single-handedly fine anyone. How do I prepare for the start of the penalty system? Since this functionality is already implemented in node, you don't need to do anything to make the system work. Please make sure you're complying with the validator guidelines. During the week, we will publish additional tools and best practices for monitoring and maintaining the effectiveness of your validator. Will the penalty system get stricter in the future? Yes, the audience and the number of transactions in TON is growing rapidly and it is vital that the quality of work is at its best. The system will improve and fines will increase this year. All updates will be announced in advance. It makes sense to set up hardware, monitoring and validator work properly. If you don't want to do this please consider using staking services https://ton.org/stake.