Your Validator Was Jailed? Here’s What To Do!

Quite a few validators have been jailed recently. Even the Binance node has been jailed twice!

Many delegators have posted looking for help. If you need to know how to redelegate ATOM from your jailed validator, you’re in luck! And, it’s simpler than you think.

Validators are jailed for having too much downtime, or for double signing blocks.

Most ATOM validators host their nodes in data centers. Downtime can happen because the data center had an outage, or because the validator failed to make a critical network update.

Validators that miss 10,000 or more blocks are jailed and slashed for downtime. The slashing penalty is just a slap on the wrist of 0.01%. That means you lose 0.01% of your tokens that are staked with the jailed validator.

The slashing penalty for double signing blocks is 5%. These are just the risks of staking tokens. That’s why it’s important to stake with the best validators.

Double signing blocks generally occurs for two reasons:

1. The validator runs multiple nodes on the same blockchain and they interfered with each other.
2. The validator is dishonest and tried to steal tokens.

Hopefully, your jailed validator was only slashed for downtime and your loss is minimal.

How to redelegate from your jailed validator

1. Click the “stake” button in Keplr or your wallet.
2. Then click “manage” next to your current jailed validator. Next to “undelegate” there’s a little arrow that somewhat hides a drop down box. Click the little arrow and you’ll see that “redelegate” is the second option.
3. Click “redelegate.”
4. A pop up appears and says “select validator.” You’re certainly welcome to redelegate and stake with us at Blocks United. The list is alphabetized, so we are right up top.
5. Next, click “max” when selecting how many tokens to redelegate, so none are left on the jailed node.
6. A pop up then appears that lets you choose low, medium, or high gas. That’s the cost for the transaction. You’ll notice a small option at the bottom right called, “Set Gas.”
7. Click “Set Gas” and type in a minimum of 4500000, which is like $2 so don’t freak out.
8. Then complete the transaction.

Within a few seconds your tokens should be staked with your new validator. You can only redelegate ATOM tokens once in 21 days.

Please comment below to let others know whether or not it worked.

Thanks!

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