Bison Trails’ New Software Could Make Slashing Penalties a Thing of the Past

Bison Trails, a Blockchain infrastructure-as-a-service provider, has created double-signing protection software, or DSP, which aims to address the slashing penalties associated with double signing messages.

According to the company, many digital asset holders consider slashing penalties to be one of the “main risks” of Blockchain participation, as they make it more difficult for the network to reach consensus.

Speaking with Cointelegraph, Aaron Henshaw, CTO and co-founder of Bison Trails, stated that such penalties could be dangerous for anyone participating with their stake in a network as “it represents a place where token holders and validators can actually lose existing funds, not just miss out on future rewards.”

Henshaw claims that the software is first being offered to users participating in the Kuzama and Tezos networks. Polkadot, Cosmos, and Celo support will then follow.

The NY-based firm said that if a cloud provider, region, or even a node has an issue with double signing events, the software will be able to respond to bring the infrastructure online and minimize downtime while ensuring that such infrastructure won’t cause a double sign.

Bison Trails’ CTO explained:

“Bison Trails can safely respond to outages and even have highly-available nodes waiting without access to the keys they would need to sign.”

In case of an outage in a primary node, the DSP could confirm the release of a private key and allow a backup node to begin validating, said Henshaw.

In July, Bison Trails announced support for Ethereum 2.0 — an upgrade that will move the network from its proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake. The network will reward validators early, with a reward rate of 23% on ETH.