What Risks are Associated with Solana Native Staking? | P2P Validator | Support Centre (2024)

1. Slashing risk (low): Slashing in Solana involves participants losing their staked SOL if they act maliciously. Currently, there's no slashing implementation on Solana, only some proposals approved - yet to be implemented.

• https://docs.solana.com/proposals/slashing

• https://docs.solana.com/proposals/optimistic-confirmation-and-slashing#slashing-roadmap

1. Protocol security risks (low): With native SOL staking, you only face the risk associated with Solana itself. In the event of a staking mechanism failure, the SOL ecosystem itself may be negatively impacted. Similarly, by being a part of that ecosystem without staking, you are exposed to a comparable level of risk.

2. Commission Rugging (low): The validator that you assign cannot steal your funds, but they can act maliciously and increase the commission to 100%, which would reduce your rewards (but not your original deposit). However, it is relatively quick to switch validators, usually taking approximately one week. ****The P2P public Solana node was launched on October 13, 2020 and has never changed its fee.

3. Failed to Update Forked Validators (low): If the validator has not been updated to the minimum required version of Solana, its node will be forked. As a result, stakers that delegate to a such validator will no longer contribute to network security and will stop receiving rewards.

4. Server Suspensions (low): If the hosting provider shuts down servers and the validator and its stakers no longer participate in staking, then they will not earn rewards. To mitigate this risk, we have implemented backup servers for our validators in different data centers. These backup servers are continuously synchronized and prepared to switch to validator mode when needed.

5. Unbonding risk (low): Investors should be aware that in the highly volatile crypto markets, they are unable to sell their tokens immediately after staking them. Unstaking SOL has a cool-down period of 1 epoch (2-3 days). It is important to take note of this lockup period before deciding to stake and consider keeping funds liquid.

For additional staking support, visit the P2P Solana Help Centre.