1.6 Block Finality and Block Intervals

Finality is the fact that all validated blocks will not be revoked once committed to the Commercio.network blockchain. When companies perform a transaction to share a document, they want to be confident that once their transactions go through, they cannot be arbitrarily changed or reversed.

When we selected our blockchain consensus protocol, we realized that finality was a vital aspect from a legal and business perspective.

There are a two types of finality:

Probabilistic finality provided by chain-based protocols (eg. Bitcoin or Ethereum), in which the probability that a transaction will not be reverted increases as the block which contains that transaction sinks deeper into the chain. The deeper the block, the more likely that the fork containing that block is the longest chain. This is why it is recommended to wait until a transaction is few blocks deep into the Bitcoin blockchain, which takes few hours, before following through on that transaction, to ensure that there is a very low likelihood of that transaction being reverted.

Instant finality provided by PBFT-based protocols (eg. Tendermint), in which a transaction is immediately considered finalized once it is included in a block and added to the blockchain. In this case, a leader will propose a block, and a sufficient fraction of a committee of validators will have to approve the block for it be committed.

Commercio.network has been developed with the Tendermint Instant finality consensus protocol and it provides the Absolute finalization of a transaction with a 5 Seconds Block Interval. Any block that receives both ⅔ or more pre-votes and pre-commits is finalized. This process continues indefinitely unless ⅓ or more validators become unresponsive, in which case the network halts — as such, Tendermint prefers consistency over availability. When PoS slashing rules are applied to Tendermint, the protocol also achieves economic finality.

IMPORTANT NOTICE

Blocks being reverted can result in losses of millions or euros or impact fundamental actions in decentralized applications. As such, Instant finality is crucial both in building robust blockchain applications and in choosing platforms on which to develop applications.