/biz/ - Business & Finance

The staking model doesn't really make sense if you think about it. At least as an investment for institutional or retail investors who don't run their own node but also in terms of security guarantees for the network users. Slashing is supposed to stop malicious or bad actions by node operators, right? And now, Sergey imagines a future where there's the community (or whoever, investors basically) who has LINK and can delegate it to node operators, getting a cut of their fees for the reputation boost they give to the node operator.

But what incentive does the node operator have to give a fuck about the staked LINK? It's not theirs anyways. Now you could say they want to keep this profitable business going, but that's a different incentive which we are not discussing, it's the implicit staking part basically. We are talking about the security guarantee that explicit staking provides. The node operators could be theoretically bought to rig some node outputs to liquidate positions or scam wick some longs/shorts. And yeah they would be slashed for it in hindsight but it doesn't matter, it's not their money! Why would they give a fuck? The money's then gone and the malicious node operators made it out with billions from the fraud they enabled. So investors lose all their money, someone gets fraudulently rekt by wrong outputs and nobody will trust this shitty Chainlink network because explicit staking doesn't actually provide any good incentives for node operators.