How Is the Severity of a Slashing Penalty Determined?

The severity of a slashing penalty is typically determined by the protocol rules and can vary based on the nature and scale of the offense. Often, there is a minimum flat penalty for any slashable offense to deter individual misbehavior.

This penalty can be increased based on the number of other validators that are slashed at the same time. This "correlation penalty" makes large-scale, coordinated attacks exponentially more costly, as the penalty scales up with the number of colluding validators.

The goal is to make coordinated attacks so financially devastating that they are never a rational economic choice.