Slashing & Penalties
Slashing
If your validator is slashed, it exits the set of active validators immediately. Until withdrawals are activated, that means that the stake that was used is locked and is unusable.
The validator can not be re-enabled after it was slashed.
Luckily, there are only three slasheable offences in the beacon chain validation.
Being a block proposer, and proposing 2 different blocks for the same slot
Being an attester and signing two different attestations with the same target slot (attesting for two different blocks for the same slot, “double voting”)
Being an attester and voting against history.
Most often, slashing happens when > 1 Validator client shares the same key set.
To avoid that, but still set up the redundancy, see the following chapters:
Inactivity Penalties
For other penalties, your validator could lose the stake but it won't be removed from the set of validators while it balance is > 16 ETH.
If it goes all the way to 16 ETH, it will be ejected from the set and it will not be able to re-join again.
The inactivity penalties include:
Not attesting to the blockchain head block
Not proposing a block when its time to do so
Proposing invalid blocks
To prevent inactivity penalties, setup monitoring and alerting properly and keep your nodes up to date. You can read more in the following chapters:
Further Reading
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