I’ll answer the questions to my best knowledge. If I’m wrong in any statement, maybe an official Incognito representative can correct me.
Yes. Community driven node (vNodes and pNodes) are subject to slashing. Only fixed nodes are immune to Slashing.
A fixed node is one of the nodes that participate in every single epoch and is never slashed or rotated. The reason they exist is to offer stability and security to the network while the network is growing.
In every epoch, the committee consists of 32 nodes. Out of these 10 are community-operated nodes that are picked from the pending queue and 22 are fixed nodes that are run by the Incognito Team. This means that today the Incognito team by the majority controls the network and also collects 66% of all block rewards.
The plan was to change this a long time ago by incrementally reducing the number of fixed nodes, but it is ultimately dependent on the total number of nodes that operate. With the low number of validator nodes (2000), if the Incognito team would release all fixed nodes slots to the public, you could theoretically take over the network by staking just a bit more than 2000 nodes. It might sound like a lot, but with today’s low PRV valuation, it’s around 73 BTC. There are a lot of individuals out there that hold more crypto than that.
For more information regarding the current plan to decentralization, see https://we.incognito.org/t/incognito-2022-technical-roadmap/15002/26?u=fredlee
The point of my post was that I personally don’t think that the PRV staking service is a good idea and I’m also against increasing the committee size. But I’m going to make a separate thread regarding that, since it’s a bit off-topic here.