Penalties
When a rental fails because of a problem on your node, Lium withholds that rental's fees for the day it fails and the day before, and refunds the renter the same amount. This page describes what triggers a penalty, what exactly is withheld, and what to do if you believe a penalty is wrong.
Penalties apply to rental fees only. Subnet emission — the alpha stake that accrues on your hotkey each tempo — is never touched by a penalty.
What a penalty withholds​
A penalty applies to the single rental that failed, not to your whole fleet, and it covers a window of 2 UTC days: the day the penalty is applied (day D) and the day before it (D-1).
| What | Effect |
|---|---|
| Rental fees for that rental, days D and D-1 | Withheld — not paid out to you |
| The renter | Refunded the same amount |
| Payouts already settled (D-2 and older) | Untouched — never clawed back |
| Subnet emission on your hotkey | Untouched |
| Your other rentals and other nodes | Untouched |
Payouts are settled with a delay of 2 days (see Payouts). That delay is what makes this window possible: when a penalty is applied, the affected days have not been paid out yet, so no money has to be taken back.
What triggers a penalty​
Three events apply a penalty automatically:
| Reason code | What happened |
|---|---|
POD_UNDEPLOY_FAILED | The validator could not undeploy or clean up the pod on your node, and ran out of retries. |
EXECUTOR_INACTIVE_MID_RENTAL | Your node stopped sending updates for more than 1 hour while a rental was active. |
BROKEN_BY_PROVIDER | You marked a stuck rented pod as broken in the Provider Portal, which force-closes the rental. |
A fourth code, MANUAL, marks a penalty applied by the Lium team by hand. It is not an automatic
trigger.
Force-closing a genuinely stuck pod is still the right action — it frees your node and ends a rental the renter cannot use. The penalty is what refunds the renter for that failed rental.
When a penalty is recorded but not charged​
Some events are logged with dry_run = true and no money is withheld:
- Spot-tier rentals. A rental that started while the node was Spot is never charged a penalty. The tier is frozen when the rental starts, so a rental that started on a Secure node can still be penalized even if the node becomes Spot later.
- Scheduled notice periods. If you set a notice period at least 24 hours ahead and then reclaim the node, the undeploy-failure and inactivity penalties are waived. The waiver extends a short time past the end of the period, because these events are detected with a delay.
Two further cases skip the penalty entirely, with nothing recorded at all: the rental produced no billable usage, or the affected days have already been paid out.
Where to see your penalties​
The Penalty Events dashboard
lists every penalty; narrow it down with the miner_hotkey and executor_id variables at the top
of the dashboard. The columns that matter:
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
reason_code | Which event caused the penalty |
amount_withheld | How much was withheld for that rental |
dry_run | true = recorded only, false = actually charged |
action | apply, or revert if the penalty was undone |
See Grafana Dashboards for the rest of the dashboard catalogue.
Effect on your node tier​
Penalties also feed the reliability rule that decides your tier. Penalty coverage is the total amount withheld by penalties over the trailing 14 days, as a share of your billed rental revenue in the same window. If it rises above 20%, all of your nodes move from Secure to Spot and stop earning subnet incentive until your coverage drops back below 20%. It is calculated across all of your nodes together, and reverted penalties do not count toward it. See Node Tier for the full rule.
Penalties recorded with dry_run = true withhold no money, but their recorded amount still counts
toward penalty coverage.
Provider ban​
A ban is not a penalty: the Lium team applies it by hand, for network abuse, matched by hotkey, coldkey or GPU UUID — so it follows the provider rather than a single node.
While a ban is in force, matching nodes earn no subnet incentive and take no new rentals, and those with nothing running are deactivated. A rental already running is never torn down: it finishes, and its rental fees keep accruing and being paid out to you.
If you believe a ban is wrong, raise it through the same support flow as a disputed penalty, below.
If you think a penalty is wrong​
A penalty can be reverted. When it is, the withheld amount is paid to you and the penalty no longer counts toward your penalty coverage. Open a support ticket through the official Discord support flow with:
- the node id (or hotkey) and the pod id,
- the time the penalty was applied, from the dashboard,
- why you believe it is wrong — for example the node was reachable the whole time, or the pod had already been removed.
The team checks the event against the validator and backend records, and reverts the penalty if it was applied in error.
Reducing penalties​
- Keep the node sending updates: most
EXECUTOR_INACTIVE_MID_RENTALevents come from the agent or the host going silent, not from a GPU problem. See Troubleshooting. - Schedule a notice period before planned maintenance instead of pulling a rented node offline.
- Switch nodes you cannot keep stable to Spot. They earn no subnet incentive, but an interrupted rental on them costs you nothing.