Validators & Staking Providers
Validators and staking providers are the backbone of Ethereum, the operators who keep the chain live. The network pays them for doing that job correctly and enforces errors with penalties, imposed for double-signing or surround voting. Slashing is rare, and most incidents trace back to operator error rather than malice, typically a duplicate key, a botched migration, or a misconfigured failover. In September 2025, setup errors across third-party staking infrastructure caused duplicate signing across 39 validators at once.
Risks faced
The exposure scales with fleet size and how much infrastructure is shared. A configuration error that costs one validator a fraction of its stake costs a large operator much more.
Validator slashing from double-signing, surround voting, and infrastructure or setup failure
Correlated slashing across validators sharing infrastructure, where penalties scale with how many are slashed together
ETH liquid staking and restaking token depeg on the tokens representing staked positions
Smart contract exploits in the staking and restaking layers built on top
ETH Slashing Cover covers slashing penalties from double-signing, surround voting, and infrastructure and setup failure. Each cover is priced against the operator’s validator setup, risk modelling and the network it runs on, rather than a standard rate. ether.fi purchased the largest ever slashing cover written to date, protecting 15,000 ETH. Depeg Cover extends to the liquid staking and restaking tokens that represent staked positions. Restaking operations, which layer additional slashing conditions on top of Ethereum’s own, can be structured as Bespoke Cover.
Mike Silagadze, Founder & CEO, ether.fi
“We’re all about security at ether.fi. We bound what any single key can do, we defend against exploits in real time, and now our stakers are protected against slashing at a size nobody else has matched. This is more security, and that’s the whole point.”
Contact us to structure cover for your validator operations
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