Finality Model

Summary

The chain uses a permissioned BFT consensus with a small authority set (initially three). Finality is deterministic: once a block is committed by quorum, it is final and will never be reverted. The system prioritizes safety over liveness: during partitions it halts rather than reorg.

Definitions

Authority: A permissioned validator participating in BFT voting.
Quorum: At least two-thirds of authorities by count (e.g., 2-of-3).
Commit: A block is committed when the BFT protocol produces a commit certificate from a quorum of authorities for that block.

Finality Guarantee

Failure and Partition Behavior

If quorum cannot be reached (e.g., network partition, authority outage), the chain halts and no new blocks are committed.
If quorum remains intact, the chain continues to make progress and commits remain final.
There are no probabilistic confirmations or reorg windows for committed blocks.

Operational Notes (What to Monitor)

Upgrade Path: PoS / Stake-Weighted Validators (stINDEX) Planned

The authority set can evolve into a stake-weighted validator set using stINDEX for weights. The quorum threshold becomes “at least two-thirds of stake weight” instead of “two-thirds of authorities,” but the external promise remains the same: committed = final. Integrators should continue to treat committed blocks as irreversible regardless of the validator weighting scheme.

Consensus Simplex BFT protocol details

Light Clients Finality proof verification

Finalization Flow Block commit process

Architecture System diagram