KIRA is a unique network in terms of ensuring uptime of its validators. Instead of penalizing delegators though "slashing" when their selected nodes go offline a system of validator "ranks" is used to incentivise validators to stay online as well as to create a friendly, competitive environment. Opposed to other PoS chains, KIRA does NOT expect 100% uptime from its validators and for that reason doesn't penalize their delegators though slashing for downtime. This is possible because validator set is governance curated and every node maintains an equal voting power in the consensus, meaning that an unknown actor can't join the consensus with stolen tokens representing voting power and thus force the chain halt. Additionally not penalizing for downtime enables hosting nodes in the home environment instead of forcing everyone to run in data centers or using large cloud providers like Azure, Google or Amazon. In short incentivising via ranks instead of penalizing via slashing increases decentralization and protects delegators funds. Expected minimum uptime from validators should be a part of the off-chain code_of_conduct (SLA) agreement accessible via Data Registry, validators who do not comply with SLA terms can be then evicted by the governance which creates and enforces its own network operation rules.

The ranking system is based of block production and missed blocks counters. If the validator participates in the block production (signs a block) his rank is increases by 1. If the validator consecutively fails to produce a block (doesn't sign proposed block) for more than MischanceConfidence number of times as defined by Network Properties, then he will be deemed offline and every next, consecutively missed block will decrease the validator rank by MischanceRankDecreaseAmount as defined by Network Properties.

For the block production to progress the consensus requires only 2/3 + 1 of all validator nodes to sign a block. For that reason it is NOT guaranteed that every validator will manage to sign every block thus a random set of up to 1/3 of validators might be missing blocks at any given point of time. Reason for this is a random distribution of nodes around the world, limited networking connectivity between them and limited time nodes await for consensus votes. In short, the more blocks pass the higher the probability of the node being offline if they do NOT participate in the block production.

Unpredictability of the chances to produce blocks is a reason why KIRA does NOT decrease a rank of a validator every time they miss a block, but rather awaits MischanceConfidence number of blocks before decreasing their ranks and incrementing "Mischance" counters. Governance can adjust MischanceConfidence to make decreasing of the validators rank probabilistically fair.

If the node is provably offline (consecutively missed blocks more than MischanceConfidence times) and his "Mischance" counter consecutively exceeds MaxMischancevalue as defined by Network Properties, then he will be deemed inactive and his rank will be "slashed" by a percentage value defined by the InactiveRankDecreasePercent. Inactive validators are kicked of the validator set and are unable to produce blocks until their operators send an "Activate Transaction" signaling that they are again ready to produce blocks and resolved their internal issue.

To perform a planned maintenance where node must be offline, validator can send a pause transaction that will remove their node from the consensus. Thanks to this the rank of the validator will remain unchanged and node will not be inactivated. After node is back online validator can send an unpause transaction which will signal to the network that it is ready to enter the consensus again.

Governance system has power to from time to time raise a proposal to reset all ranks in order to create even odds for all validators, making node performance more clear and transparent to the public.

Depending on the activity validator node can have one of the following statuses