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 emissions. Penalties 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:
- Radix Tech Docs
- How XRD staking emissions rewards are calculated - general
- How XRD staking emissions rewards and validator fees are calculated - for validators