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What happens if a validator node misses many consensus rounds?

In short, these validators will lose emissions XRD, and the market price of the relevant Liquid Stake Unit (LSU) tokens may change as a result. This is important to ensure that node-runners have a strong incentive to keep the network stable, reliable, and performant.

Of course, in the real world, things happen. Regions go offline; cables get cut; data centers get flooded.  Unfortunately, the Radix Protocol can not establish a “reason” for a validator node not participating in consensus. We recommended that validator node-runners employ strategies to ensure high availability, such as those presented in our technical documentation.

The good news is, as long as such problems are infrequent, validator node-runners and stakers won’t miss out on many emissionsPenalties are calculated per-epoch, and with epochs occurring roughly every 5 minutes, a node-runner that brings their node back online quickly will also quickly pick back up earning rewards.

Further reading: