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by cmckn 1797 days ago
Yup. The penalty is not kept by anyone though, it’s burned. Once your balance drops to 16 ETH, you’re removed from the validator pool. This happens slowly and depends on many factors of the current network.

https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/faq

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How badly will I be penalized for being offline?

It depends. In addition to the impact of effective balance there are two important scenarios to be aware of:

Being offline while a supermajority (2/3) of validators is still online leads to relatively small penalties as there are still enough validators online for the chain to finalize. This is the expected scenario.

Being offline at the same time as more than 1/3 of the total number of validators leads to harsher penalties, since blocks do not finalize anymore. This scenario is very extreme and unlikely to happen.

Note that in the second (unlikely) scenario, you stand to progressively lose up to 50% (16 ETH) of your stake over 21 days. After 21 days you are ejected out of the validator pool. This ensures that blocks start finalizing again at some point.

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